
§ LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN; 



A SKETCH 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON. 



/ 



BY REV. THOMAS BINNEY. 




BOSTON: 
7M. CROSBY AND H. P. NICHOLS, 

No. Ill "Washington Street. 
1851. 



3> 






Stereotyped by 

ROBAKT & ItOBBINSJ 

New England Type and Stereotype Foundery, 



LC c °ntrol Number 




t ®p96 027177 

ADVERTISEMENT. 



The substance of the "Lecture," which is here 
reprinted from the English edition, was delivered in 
Exeter Hall, London, before the " Young Men's 
Christian Association," as one of a series instituted 
by the Association, in connection with other efforts 
for "the improvement of the spiritual and mental 
condition of commercial young men." In his prefa- 
tory advertisement, the writer apologizes for the 
length to which the discourse has been extended in 
his subsequent preparation of it for the press. "We 
do not think the readers of this excellent sketch of an 
admirable man will feel any disposition to complain 
of undue minuteness of detail, or tedious comment. 
Some passages might have been made more agreeable 
to the American publishers by a slight modification 
of the sentiment or language, but they have not 
thought it proper to omit or alter anything. Those 



4 ADVERTISEMENT. 

who may wish to gain a fuller acquaintance with the 
character of Sir Fowell Buxton, or with the events of 
his life, are referred to the " Memoirs of Sir Thomas 
Fowell Buxton, with Selections from his Correspon- 
dence, edited by his Son, Charles Buxton, Esq.," 
republished in Philadelphia the last year. 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 



Towards the close of the last century, about 
the year 1798, as it was drawing nigh to the 
Easter holidays, a respectable widow lady, 
neatly apparelled as a member of the Society 
of Friends, — or with just, perhaps, a shade or 
two less than what was required by profes- 
sional strictness, — might have been seen on 
her way from London to Greenwich, where 
she had two or three of her sons at school. One 
of them was a lad of some twelve years of 
age. He was bold and impetuous — rather of 
a violent and " domineering disposition ; " he 
had been fatherless from his sixth year, and 
his mother had "allowed him to assume, at 
home, the position and airs of the master of the 
house : " " his brothers and sisters had to yield 
him obedience ; " he felt himself rather encour- 
aged " to play the little tyrant," and was not 
very reluctant to try the character. During 
the Christmas holidays previous to the time we 
refer to, u Master Fowell had been angry, and 
had struck his sister's governess ; " and, to 
punish this outbreak. Master Fowell had been 
threatened with being left at school when his 

i* 



6 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

brothers should return home at Easter. Cir- 
cumstances, however, led the mother to think 
she had better not carry the threat into effect, 
and so she went down to Greenwich to see the 
boy, and settle the matter with him. She received 
an answer combining in it something of hero- 
ism and something of hardihood, — the latter, 
however, so predominating, that " she left him, 
resolutely, to his punishment." The boy did 
not stay very long at school after this. He 
never made much progress there. He got other 
boys to do his exercises ; and at fifteen returned 
home, and stayed at home doing nothing but 
what he pleased ; — and what did please him 
was, riding, and shooting, and boating — read- 
ing for amusement — or anything but work. 
He had good expectations as to property, — 
but some of these were blasted ; — and at two- 
and-twenty, with a wife and child, he would 
have given anything "for a situation of £100 
a-year, if he had to work twelve hours a day 
for it." Now, let the principal points of that 
picture be attentively observed and kept firmly 
in remembrance, and then turn with me to 
another. 

We will come down to within four years of 
the present time — to February, 1S45. Imagine 
yourselves standing before the residence of a 
country gentleman, — a hall, with its lawn, and 
fields, and old trees ; with its garden, and park, 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 7 

and woodlands, — and all the other signs of the 
worldly wealth and the respectable social stand- 
ing of its possessor. We will draw nigh, and 
enter, and observe. The owner of this fair 
domain appears to be the head' of a numerous 
household. Sons and daughters, children and 
grandchildren, have sprung from him. Many 
of them are here. Everything in the house 
indicates substance, elegance, refinement; — 
everything about its inmates, education, talent, 
accomplishments, piety. But where are we 
now? Hush! Tread softly; — we have ap- 
proached and are entering the chamber of a 
dying man ! The master of the mansion is 
nigh to his last hour, and all things seem to 
say to us, " Mark the perfect man and behold 
the upright : for the end of that man is peace." 
He is resigned, calm, hopeful, triumphant. He 
utters expressions of the most spiritual nature, 
indicating his familiar acquaintance with the 
truths of evangelical religion, and his deep 
experience of vital godliness! — But his family 
have gathered about his bed. He has fallen 
asleep. All is over ! What a deep, sacred 
silence has succeeded those last, lingering indi- 
cations of life ! — a silence broken at length by 
the brother of the dead — a man publicly dis- 
tinguished and extensively venerated for wis- 
dom, devotion, piety and goodness. His voice, 
tremulous with emotion, yet rising into clear- 



8 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

ness and force as he gives utterance to his calm 
joy, grateful admiration and firm faith, conveys 
to us these thrilling words of truth and love : 
" Never was death more still, and solemn, and 
gentle ! This chamber presents one of the fair- 
est pictures that ever met the eye ! Such an 
expression of intellectual power and refine- 
??ie?it, — of love to God and man, — I have 
never before seen in any human countenance." 
But now, connect with this which is passing 
within, the knowledge and indications of what 
is passing without, and include in the picture, 
or combine rather with it, in your recollections, 
subsequent events. The illness and death of 
this man are matters of national interest. He 
is spoken of in the newspapers, of both city 
and country, as one who had passed a public 
life of great usefulness and distinction ; whose 
condition excites constant inquiries, and wide- 
spread sympathy; and whose death is trembling- 
ly anticipated as a blow that will reverberate 
through half the world. His funeral, though 
as private as possible, is like the gathering of 
a clan, or the meeting and mourning of many 
tribes. His memory is to be honored by a 
public monument. The husband of the queen 
heads the subscription. Numbers throughout 
the land, of all ranks, join willingly in the 
work. Multitudes from afar — rescued and 
liberated bondsmen, with hearts bearing on 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 9 

them the name, heaving and beating at the 
remembrance of their advocate and benefactor 
— bring together pence and half-pence from so 
many hands that £450 was sent over by them ! 
Fifty thousand persons, exclusive of those in 
this country, subscribe to this monument. And 
at length it is raised — raised in Westminster 
Abbey ; — the highest distinction this that can 
be conferred on man, — the greatest and rich- 
est honor that the first and greatest nation in 
the world has in its power to pay to science, to 
arms, to genius, or to virtue ! There he stands; — 
the raw, rude boy of 1798, transformed into the 
noble, intellectual, patriotic, public man, — the 
devout and pious Christian, whose loss, in 
1845, is mourned alike at the equator and the 
Indies ! The lad, who was content to depend 
on the help of others for his learning, and who 
seemed at one time to care for nothing but 
vagrant and volatile enjoyment, — he grew 
into this good, great and heroic man ; and he 
stands there in his place, in the noblest edifice 
of the empire, among poets, politicians, and 
philanthropists, elevated to the rank and shar- 
ing the immortality of those various forms of 
beneficence or greatness that have adorned the 
land and done honor to human nature ! 

Such are the two pictures presented by Sir 
Fowell Buxton to the thoughtful and reflective 
reader, at the beginning and the close of life ; — 



10 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

and the object I have in view to-night is, to 
show you how the one picture grew and 
changed into the other. You are to mark the 
beginning and the advance of this process ; — 
its cause or occasion, its elements and auxilia- 
ries, or anything else of importance connected 
with it ; and then, you are to lay to heart the 
lessons that it teaches, and to reduce to prac- 
tice these lessons in your lives. 

There are three questions to be asked respect- 
ing Sir Fowell Buxton — to each of which the 
printed book* lying before us affords full, 
satisfactory, and suggestive replies : but which 
I can do nothing with to-night, except to direct 
you, by a few hints, how to reply to, by read- 
ing and studying the book for yourselves. 

The three points, then, to be investigated 
respecting Sir Fowell Buxton you will find to 
turn upon what he did; — on what he ivas, to 
be capable of doing it; — and on how he 
came to be what he was. That is to say, — 
What were the things which constituted his 
outward, visible life, — which men saw, and 
could judge of and appreciate? What were 
those inward elements — those sources of power 
and strength, of either head or heart — which 
were the vital main-springs of his active being? 
— and then, again, the last question , — How was 

* " The Life of Sir T. F. Buxton, Bart." By his son, 
Charles Buxton, Esq. 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 11 

it that his mind was awakened ? — what gave 
it its direction, — determined its orbit, — influ- 
enced its movements ? How much had he 
originally in himself? — how much, and what, 
did he owe to circumstances 1 — to the influ- 
ence of others? — to luck? to accident? to for- 
tune ? or to God ? 

I wish to say a few things to help you to a 
solution of these inquiries. 

I. 

The first question respects what Sir Fowell 
Buxton did, — what was visible to the world, 
and might be " seen and read of all men." I 
shall attempt a very brief enumeration of the 
facts of his public life. 

What did Sir Fowell Buxton do ? Why, in 
the first place, he got married. He married in 
1807, just when he came of age, — he was 
about six weeks beyond twenty-one. In 180S, 
he had both wife and child, but had nothing 
to do. He had, as I before hinted, failed to 
inherit large Irish property which he once 
counted upon ; and now, though not in positive 
want, was yet anxious for employment, and, as 
has been said, would have been glad of a 
clerk's place of a hundred a-year. He thought 
of turning Blackwell Hall factor ; and revolved, 
probably, many other plans. However, he was 
brought into contact with his uncles, the Han- 



12 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

burys ; and after an interview or two, he was 
received as a clerk at a salary, with the prom- 
ise of a partnership at the end of three years. 
In 1811, when his probation expired, he obtained 
that partnership ; — he retained it to the end of 
his life ; and, in consequence mainly of his 
suggestions and superintendence, the business 
of the firm so increased as to produce to the 
members of it large profits. Sir F. Buxton 
became possessed of considerable property, the 
greater portion of it, I imagine, so directly the 
result of his own exertions, that it may be said 
of him, — what you, young men, should remem- 
ber is a great and honorable secular testi- 
mony, — that, in respect to his wealth and 
worldly advancement, as a man of business, if 
not the absolute founder, he was at least the 
builder up, of his own fortune. Unquestionably, 
the greatest thing that can be said of a man is, 
" that he had no father: that he sprang from 
nothing, and made himself; that he was born 
mud and died marble : " but the next best thing 
is, "that, having something, he made it more; 
— being given the fulcrum, — the standing point 
for his energies, — he invented his machines 
and wrought his engines, till he made con- 
quests and gained territory that gaA x c lustre to 
the paternal name which lent him at first its 
own for his beginnings." 

The Greenwich school-boy, then, is now the 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BT7XTON, BART. 13 

man of business in Spitalfields ; with plenty on 
his hands daily in the city, and a family con- 
stantly increasing at home. He is interested 
and active, however, in religious and benevo- 
lent societies, — in the instruction of the poor, 
and the relief of the destitute ; — till, in 1816, 
when he had attained his thirtieth year, an 
event occurred which marked him out for pub- 
lic life far beyond the precincts of Spitalfields, 
and was the immediate occasion of his entrance 
upon it. This was a speech which he deliv- 
ered at a meeting held for the relief of the 
Spitalfields weavers, and presided over by the 
Lord Mayor. The effect of this speech was 
extraordinary. I have no doubt its delivery 
told on the audience, not only from the fulness 
and character of its information and facts, but 
from the commanding person of the speaker, 
his rich voice, benignant countenance, and 
pathetic tones. Without these accessories, how- 
ever, — simply as a speech reported in the 
newspapers, — the impression of it was deep 
and extensive. It was republished by opposite 
political parties. It was circulated extensively. 
It was a principal means of producing a splen- 
did royal benefaction ; and it called forth from 
Mr. Wilberforce a letter to the speaker, hailing 
him as an acquisition for the support and advo- 
cacy of every good cause, and anticipating and 
2 



14 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

urging his appearance in parliament as the 
appropriate sphere of his talents and influence. 
In 1817, he published a work on Prison Dis- 
cipline. Six editions of it were sold the first 
year. It gave depth and extent to that sym- 
pathy with the subject which many already 
felt, and greatly elevated the writer's reputation. 
It was referred to in parliament by the most 
illustrious speakers, and in the most glowing 
terms. It was translated into other tongues. 
It produced fruit in Ireland, in France, in Tur- 
key, and India, besides its immediate results 
among ourselves. It is a fine thing this ! — a 
Spitalfields brewer, a man busily engaged in 
seeing to business, and making his fortune; 
drawn, on the one hand, by relative attractions, 
and meeting, on the other, his full proportion of 
domestic care; — at the age of thirty, producing 
a book which instantaneously affected the largest 
hearts and the loftiest minds in different nations ; 
— told in the councils of state and the closets of 
kings ; — aroused the zeal and guided the activity 
of the philanthropic ; — excited the admiration 
and called forth the eulogy of distinguished phi- 
losophers and eloquent patriots, and produced 
immediate practical results not only in England 
and on the continent, but in those distant ori- 
ental regions, the oldest inhabited by man, and 
that new western world, in which society is 
appearing in its latest developments. 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 15 

In 1818, he entered Parliament. He had a 
seat in that assembly till 1837. During these 
nineteen years, he pursued his own special ob- 
jects, and took comparatively little part in gen- 
eral politics. The great cause to which he was 
devoted was the emancipation of the slaves in 
the British colonies. He was selected by Wilber- 
force to succeed to the leadership of that great 
movement. He accepted the trust with a deep 
sense of its responsibility and sacredness; he 
gave to it his strength and time, his intellect 
and heart, his days and nights, his enthusiasm 
and devotion ; he discharged it with conscien- 
tious faithfulness, with unflinching zeal, with 
eminent ability, and, by God's blessing, with 
ultimate success. For ten years, — from the 
year 1823, when he made his first memorable 
motion on the subject, to the year 1833, when 
it was first taken up by government and finally 
settled, — it was the grand object, the absorbing 
pursuit, its service and advocacy the predomi- 
nant and ruling passion, of his life. To those 
of you who are not old enough (and few of 
those whom I address are so) to have any 'per- 
sonal remembrance of the earlier stages, and of 
the battle and war that marked the culmination 
and the close of the anti-slavery struggle, much 
of the volume before us will have great interest ; 
some parts of it stirring the soul like the inci- 
dents of a tragedy, and others carrying it away 



16 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

as with the excitement of a romance ; and yet 
this one book is but one of what are written, or 
what might be written, on this subject. 

The anti-slavery cause, however, though the 
principal, was not the exclusive object of Sir 
Fowell Buxton's energies. Prison discipline; 
the criminal law, especially as relating to capi- 
tal punishments ; the cause of the Hottentots in 
South Africa; the Mauritius slave trade; the 
condition, treatment, rights and claims, of the 
aboriginal inhabitants of our various colonies ; — 
these, with frequent matters of special tempo- 
rary interest connected with the slaves or slave 
owners, and every sort of kindred subject, occu- 
pied the attention and commanded the services 
of Sir Fowell Buxton while in parliament. In 
that assembly, — with all its imperfections, the 
first in the world for knowledge and ability; 
the most difficult to win, the hardest to subdue ; 
the keenest in its perception of ignorance and 
pretence ; the plainest in its demonstrations of 
inattention or contempt ; the most stringent in 
its demands for something worth hearing, if the 
man is to continue to be heard ; and the most 
just, generally, in the long run, to unequivocal 
proofs of fulness and power ; — in that assembly, 
Sir Fowell Buxton soon took a distinguished 
place. He always commanded attention and 
respect, however his views might provoke oppo- 
sition. He was the leader or the colleague of 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 17 

some of its noblest and mightiest men ; and, 
along with them, and even personally, he wielded 
an influence which made itself felt not only in 
the obedience of followers, but ultimately on 
the councillors of the sovereign, the laws of the 
realm, and the dissolution and re-construction 
of a state of society, in the upholding of which 
a powerful, active and determined class had, as 
they imagined, all their hopes and interests in- 
volved. It is not surprising that such a man, 
when at length he lost his election, should im- 
mediately have been invited to represent, and 
should have received offers of support from, 
twenty-seven other places ! 

When Sir Fowell Buxton left parliament, 
and retired into private life, his thoughts still 
turned to and fondly lingered on his favorite 
objects. His last great subject of interest was 
a plan for the suppression of the slave-trade, 
and the civilization of Africa. To promote this, 
he devoted much time and great labor to the 
collection of information, and then to the pro- 
duction of a volume entitled '"The Slave-trade 
and its Remedy." Out of these thoughts and 
utterances, in connection with the aid and enter- 
prise of associates, sprang the Niger expedition ; 
the equipment and despatch of three vessels to 
the coast of Africa, with (all must acknowl- 
edge) the purest and noblest intentions, how- 
ever unfortunate and disastrous the result. The 



18 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

failure of this last great scheme of our magnan- 
imous philanthropist— strong and magnanimous 
as he was — affected him much, and told, doubt- 
less, on his once athletic and iron frame. His 
health had been visibly declining for some time; 
but with the Niger expedition his public life 
closed and determined. 

It remains only further to be stated, that, 
during the whole of Sir Fowell Buxton's career, 
he was the personal friend and public advocate 
of many great religious institutions. The 
Bible Society, Church Missions, City Missions, 
and kindred confederacies, had at once his influ- 
ence, his eloquence, his purse, and hig prayers. 
He had intimate friendships with spiritual Chris- 
tians of different sects, though the most numer- 
ous and close were, of course, in his own church, 
and among his own kindred. He was venerated 
and beloved as an eminently devout and holy 
man, by those who knew him best. He was 
stigmatized as a fanatic and a saint, by those 
who could find nothing against him but what 
" concerned the law of his God." At length, 
worn out by public labor, but laden with hon- 
ors, and ripe in goodness — distinguished by 
title, which his sovereign, the fountain of earthly 
rank, spontaneously conferred, and still more 
by the hand and grace of the King of kings — 
at the comparatively early age of fifty-nine, our 
illustrious philanthropist was called to his re- 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 19 

pose. His life, in all respects, was eminently 
prosperous, useful, and happy. He was blessed 
in relation to both worlds — in the concerns 
alike of his spiritual interests and public career. 
He who "gave him power to get wealth," — 
who surrounded him with friends and family, 
and made his home as a paradise about him,— 
who gave him success in most of his works for 
his generation and his race, — sustained him to 
the last by spiritual influences and religious 
faith, so that the closing scene was one of radi- 
ant hope and tranquil triumph ! Thus aided, 
honored and blessed. Sir Fowell Buxton pur- 
posed and worked, and lived and died ; and 
when he died, it was felt by numbers of all 
classes, of various churches, and of many lands, 

that " A PRINCE AND A GREAT MAN HAD FALLEN IN 

Israel." 

II. 
This brief and rapid review — meagre and 
imperfect as it is — of what Sir Fowell actually 
did, brings us to the other questions which we 
proposed respecting him. What teas he, who 
did all this, as to his inward self? What were 
the constituent elements of his mind and char- 
acter? What were the interior sources — intel- 
lectual, moral, or emotional — of that kind and 
degree of outward and visible action which we 
have surveyed ? And how came he to be this ? 
Whence was that inward man that underlay 



20 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

and animated the outward? How much of 
him was elementary and inherent — born with 
the latter — and slumbering, from the first, in 
his rude material 1 How much of him was 
added, or superinduced, by subsequent event or 
divine donation % By what means, circum- 
stances, agents, plans, were the life and faculties 
of this inward man evoked, developed, strength- 
ened, sustained 1 These and similar questions 
will present themselves to reflective observers, 
in respect to Sir Fowell Buxton, as, indeed, such 
inquiries naturally do in relation to all kindred 
cases ; and it is from the replies to these ques- 
tions, and from your careful study of the book 
by which the materials of such replies are fur- 
nished, that my hope springs of you, young 
men, deriving great and lasting good from your 
contemplation of the subject of the present lec- 
ture. 

What Sir Fowell Buxton was, — and how 
he came to be what he was, — we shall not 
pursue as separate inquiries. A brief connected 
series of observations may be so constructed as 
to include and combine what will furnish a 
reply to both questions at once. Observe, then, 
how the case stands. To put it in all its com- 
pleteness before you, may involve an anticipa- 
tion of one or two points not yet strictly in 
court, nor properly belonging to what Buxton 
did. Still, we are disposed to include them in 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 21 

the statement of the question, by finishing off 
with them the portrait of the man. Mark, then, 
the combination of phenomena in front of us. 
A somewhat rude, thoughtless, idle lad, of des- 
ultory habits, without any stirring within him 
of the aspiration of genius, or of high intellect- 
ual and literary tastes ; who had nothing re- 
markable about him as a school-boy ; who read 
as a youth only for amusement, and lived appar- 
ently only for his horses, his guns, and dogs ; 
who, at nineteen or twenty, lost property he 
had expected to inherit; and, at twenty-two, 
was a husband and a father, but without em- 
ployment, and wanting money ; — this lad grows 
up, in after life, after passing through that pecu- 
niary pinch of his early manhood, not only into 
a man of wealth and influence, but into an 
author, a legislator, and a saint ; into a person 
distinguished by intellectual vigor — whose writ- 
ings displayed ample knowledge, high culture, 
forcible argument, eloquence and pathos; into 
a public speaker of commanding power, parlia- 
mentary reputation, and substantial popularity; 
into a public man of influence and weight not 
to be withstood — filling a place in the eye of 
the nation, and doing a work in the politics of 
the world; into a character, moreover, distin- 
guished by holy and spiritual qualities, as well 
as by such as were intellectual, moral, social, 
philanthropic ; that was as much distinguished 



22 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

by its grace and beauty, as by its strength and 
massiveness, — as condescending and gentle as 
it was majestic ; and which, while exposed per- 
petually to the dust and dirt of this earthly life 
— the choking and contaminating influences of 
the world — ever seemed to be surrounded by 
the atmosphere, to be basking in the sunlight, 
refreshed by the breezes, and colored with the 
hues of heaven. How was it, we ask, that all 
this came about ? That the man was what he 
was at all? and that he continued to be it to 
the end ? 

Let us see. 

I. In the first place, he was distinguished by 
power. His determinations were supreme and 
regal. His purpose, once fixed, was inflexible. 
His perseverance inaction — his independence 
and self-trust — his capacity for courageous and 
continued labor — were as great and remarka- 
ble as the pertinacity, force, and decision of his 
will. For all this, — constituting the predomi- 
nant elements of his character, and some of the 
prime sources of his success, — he was indebted 
to his parents, especially to his mother ; — in- 
debted to them on grounds partaking at once of 
necessity and virtue, — of fixed, settled law, and 
of free moral intention. His father died when 
he was six years old. He was a man of sense 
and goodness, of temperate and healthy habits, 
of pure life and benevolent instincts ; and he 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 23 

gave to his son, by God's blessing, and by his 
own and his wife's virtue, a vigorous constitu- 
tion, a well-knit and firmly compacted body, 
however loose or unwieldy it might look at first. 
Sir Foweli Buxton inherited from his parents 
the great and incalculable blessing of a sound, 
healthy physical structure ; a robust, muscular 
frame — and with that, (my philosophical and 
religious creed alike teach,) many important 
elements of character — as to temperament, dis- 
position, moral instincts, tastes, tendencies; aspi- 
rations ready to be awakened; capacities and 
powers having within them a native impulsive 
force towards the good and the better, rather 
than the bad. The truth embodied in these 
remarks is a truth, the doubts and dogmas of 
certain good men notwithstanding. It is one to 
which a false delicacy — a delicacy rather dis- 
eased than healthy, rather prurient than pure — 
prevents allusion to be plainly made. I have no 
doubt about universal human depravity, in the 
sense of the universal, natural destitution of god- 
liness ; but as to the constitutional condition of 
individuals, in respect to many original tastes 
and impulses of a moral nature, there are vast 
differences between men, and among them all 
kinds and degrees of depravity ; and the great 
point is, that this is owing to the intellectual, 
moral, and physical condition of fathers and 
mothers. The transmission to children of intel- 



24 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

lectual, moral, and physical tendencies is a 
great fact ; it is one to which the attention of 
the young should be turned, instead of its 
being tacitly or openly tabooed, for it is one in 
which they are directly interested. According 
as they practically act in relation to it, they 
may injure or benefit the coming generation, — ■ 
may make the fulfilment of their duties as par- 
ents facile or difficult — and the feelings with 
which they shall regard their offspring as dew 
to the heart, or as a serpent to the soul. 

It is of vast advantage to be born of healthy 
and virtuous parents ; it is a further advantage 
to be the children of those whose intellect has 
been thoroughly disciplined and developed; a 
further still, to be surrounded in infancy and 
early childhood with such guiding and elevating 
home-influences as tend to inspire pure tastes 
and high aspirations, and to create or strengthen 
repugnance to whatever is low, sensual, or false; 
and, last of all, it is a blessing and an advan- 
tage, utterly incalculable, to" have for a mother 
a woman of sense, superiority, and goodness; 
with force of character ; with talents and clever- 
ness; of solid information; with tact, temper, 
patience, and skill, fitted to train and mould the 
mind, to implant principles, and awaken a lofty 
and laudable ambition ; and all this presided 
over and purified by religious faith, deep piety, 
and earnest devotion. These are the mothers 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 25 

that the church and the world alike want. The 
destinies of the race depend more on its future 
mothers than on anything else : that is to say, 
on the sort of women that young girls and young 
ladies are to be made into, or into which they 
will make themselves; and the sort of wives 
that young men will have the sense to prefer, 
the judgment to select, and the happiness to 
secure. There is nothing so little thought of 
by the young, and no single thing that would 
be in its issues of such moment, as for the one 
sex to remember that they are born to be the 
makers of future men, and for the other to feel 
that what they want in marriage are not merely 
mates for themselves, but mothers for their chil- 
dren. Clever women are of more importance 
to the world than clever men. I refer, of course, 
not to illustrious individuals on whom society 
depends for advance in the arts, in legislation, 
or in science — who extend the boundaries of 
knowledge, who receive and pass the torch of 
genius, perpetuate eloquence, or preserve truth ; 
I refer to the culture and strength that may dis- 
tinguish the general mind — the characteristics 
of the mass of men and women who constitute 
society, and from whom not only posterity, as a 
whole, will receive an impress, but among whom 
the individual hero, too, must be born and bred. 
On the two suppositions that all men were 
clever and all women weak — or that all the 



26 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

women were superior and all the men fools — 
there would be by far the best prospect for the 
world on the latter alternative, both with respect 
to the general condition of the race, and the 
appearance of those who should be personally 
eminent for ability and genius. The mother 
has most to do with all that awakens the young 
spirit in its early freshness, and that makes that 
child that is to be "father to the man;" and 
she gives, perhaps, more of the impress of her 
whole being, physical and mental, to the origi- 
nal constitution and capacities of her offspring. 
Weak men, with superior wives, have had sons 
distinguished by very high intellectual ability ; 
but the greatest men, with fools for their por- 
tion, have seldom been anything but the fathers 
of fools. The great Lord Bacon was the repre- 
sentative of one that would have been memora- 
ble and illustrious but for the gigantic and 
overshadowing genius of his son. His father, 
Sir Nicholas, was twice married ; his first wife 
was a weak woman, and bore nothing but a 
mean and poor intellectual offspring ; his second 
wife was distinguished and superior, — a woman 
of capacity, of strong sense, mental culture, and 
great energy; she was the mother of Bacon. 
Without denying that there are many excep- 
tions to what we affirm, we still do affirm, that 
the facts and phenomena are of such a nature, 
in relation to this question, as clearly to indicate 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 27 

the general law, that men, for the most part, con- 
stitutionally, — not only as to their bodies, but 
as to their intellectual powers, their moral in- 
stincts, and their capacity to take a higher or 
lower polish from external influences, — are, 
very much, not only what their remote progen- 
itors in Paradise provided for, but what their 
immediate fathers and mothers make them. 

Still, whatever may be the constitutional ca- 
pacity of a boy, the turn that he may take, the 
forms into which the general power may evolve, 
depend greatly on first impressions and early 
management; and here it is that the mother 
is so important to the future man. Weak, 
trifling, careless, and selfish mothers will neg- 
lect often the finest material; ignorant of the 
value of what they hold in their hands, inca- 
pable of fashioning it, negligent and perverse, 
they allow it to remain raw, rude, and un- 
worked, — or they give it a wrong and hurtful 
direction, — or they suffer it to shape itself, 
moved from within by blind impulses which it 
was their part to have purified and controlled ; 
or caught by objects and influences from with- 
out, which act upon " the flesh" like the atmos- 
phere on the dead. Now, I do not mean to say 
that Sir Fowell Buxton's mother was the wisest 
and most accomplished woman in the world ; — 
that she had no weakness, or committed no 
error in the management of her children. It is 



28 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

rather, perhaps, to be admitted that she went 
to an extreme in her methods of securing that 
one thing which she strongly and preeminently 
desiderated for her son; but then she suc- 
ceeded, — we must remember that. He turned 
out the sort of man that she wished to make him. 
Her desire was, that he should have a strong, 
vigorous, decided character: have mental inde- 
pendence, moral courage, an unconquerable will. 
Her idea of a man was, robustness, power, self- 
trust, general capacity for any achievement he 
might deem it right to undertake, — united, 
however, with candor and benevolence, loving 
thoughts, sympathy with suffering, and im- 
patience with, and hostility to, injustice and 
wrong. She despised whatever was weak, ef- 
feminate, and luxurious. She erred somewhat 
in allowing Fowell, as the eldest son, while yet 
but a boy, to assume the position of the master 
of the house, and in requiring his brothers and 
sisters to obey him. But she peremptorily de- 
manded his obedience herself. Her rules were, 
in one direction, "little indulgence but much 
liberty;" and in another, "implicit obedience, 
unconditional submission." Fowell was en- 
couraged to converse with her as an equal, and 
to form and express his opinions without reserve. 
The consequence was, that he early acquired the 
habit of resolutely thinking and acting for him- 
self; and to this habitual* independence and 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 29 

decision he was accustomed to say that he 
stood indebted for all the success he had met 
with in life. But, along with this element of 
power, it was Mrs. Buxton's object to inspire 
her children with sentiments that would induce 
self-denial and self-sacrifice, and render them 
thoughtful for the happiness of others. His 
father, when filling the office of sheriff, devoted 
his attention to the condition of the prisoners 
and the discipline of the jail. His mother talked 
with him, there can be little doubt, of this cir- 
cumstance, — it is known that she did of the 
horrors of the slave-trade and the sufferings of 
the slave. It is as natural, therefore, in fact, as 
it is beautiful in itself and encouraging to others, 
to find him saying to her, in the meridian of his 
manhood and in the midst of his multitudinous 
and merciful pursuits, " I constantly feel, espec- 
ially in action and exertion for others, the ef- 
fects of principles early implanted by you in my 
mind." He had a high idea of his mother's 
character ; her large-mindedness, intellect, cour- 
age, disinterestedness, generosity, and general 
excellence. His . love for her was strong, his 
veneration great ; and mothers who have really 
earned love and veneration are very seldom 
defrauded of either. She lived to see him all 
that she could wish, and far more, perhaps, 
than she had once hoped. Time did more than 
justify the trust and fulfil the prediction, which, 
3* 



30 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

when his self-will as a boy was remarked to 
her. she expressed by saying, "Never mind; 
he is self-willed now — you will see it turn out 
well in the end." 

This, then, is the one great, predominating, 
regal power which characterized Sir F. Bux- 
ton's inner life, and made him what he was. 
He was a man of strong energy, stern purpose, 
with an indomitable will, and at the same 
time capable, from his physical vigor, of long- 
continued and intense application. His appear- 
ance was herculean ; his soul large and power- 
ful, like his body. Having made up his mind 
that a thing was possible and ought to be 
attempted, he put forth his hand, and never 
withdrew it, and never flagged. Convinced 
that he was right, he stood his ground with 
unflinching and manly courage, and was wil- 
ling to suffer in his private friendships or public 
popularity. The basis of all this consisted 
partly in the original conformation of his body 
and mind, and partly in the impressions made 
upon him by his mother — the habits she 
encouraged, the principles she implanted, the 
soul she sought to breathe into him, or to 
awaken, by the whole of her influence ; and in 
this she was aided by a singular assistant, 
whom Buxton used to call his "first tutor." 
This was the gamekeeper — Abraham Plais- 
tow. But Abraham Plaistow was no common 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON ; BART. 31 

character, no ordinary "preserver of game/' 
whether the title belongs to serf or sovereign. 
He was one of those remarkable men who are 
sometimes to be met with in humble life, who 
are constitutionally constructed of the very best 
materials ; — composed of the same marble or 
clay of which the finest specimens of humanity 
are made; — of whom consist the "Tillage 
Hampdens," the "bloodless Cromwells," the 
"mute, inglorious Miltons," of the poet,— 
pieces and blocks of the raw material of heroic 
men. Under the auspices and tuition of this 
gamekeeper, young Buxton acquired his taste 
for hunting and shooting, and was indebted to 
him for much of his skill in these accomplish- 
ments. But he owed to him better and higher 
things. Abraham was a thorough and noble 
man. He was a philosopher and a general ; — 
a wise, good, and sagacious friend, who had 
counsels to give and principles to implant ; — a 
resolute master, too, of his young pupils, who, 
when they were in the wrong, carried his 
point and would be obeyed. He could neither 
read nor write. But his memory was stored 
with rustic knowledge ; his heart was the seat 
of integrity and honor ; he was intellectual in 
his way ; a great original : undaunted, fearless, 
and with moral courage equal to his animal 
insensibility to danger. To his constant com- 
panionship with such " a guide, philosopher, 



32 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

and friend," in all his out-door occupations and 
pursuits, young Buxton was greatly indebted 
for the growth and nurture of that manly 
robustness of character, and that high-souled 
superiority to meanness and wrong, of which it 
was the object of the watchful in-door mater- 
nal influence to sow the seeds. 

The seeds were sown. They took deep root. 
There were soon strength and independence 
enough, — rude energy, self-will, with fondness 
for violent physical exertions ; but no indica- 
tions of intellectual ambition, literary taste, or 
high personal aspirations and aims. At fifteen, 
Sir Fowell Buxton was most perilously circum- 
stanced. He had left school : had no tutor ; no 
pursuits but what he was pleased to select for 
himself; he had not made great progress in 
learning; he was a bad scholar, but a good 
shot; his delight was to be in the fields, with a 
horse under him, or with a gun in his hand and 
a bird in his eye ; or in a boat ; or with his dogs ; 
or reading for amusement, but shirking what- 
ever was of a higher flight. His manners, too, 
were uncouth ; he was awkward, ungraceful ; 
had not acquired external polish, nor could 
enter with ease into elegant society. His 
friends sometimes would try ridicule to correct 
his roughness, instead of which it discouraged 
and annoyed. It was altogether a dangerous 
experiment. His permitted idleness, his devo- 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL EUXTON, BART. 33 

tion to sport, his want of personal grace and 
accomplishments, and his friends and relatives' 
mode of reproof, were all alike perilous to the 
lad. He was just at a point where the raw 
material, of which his character as yet only 
consisted, might he taken and worked for evil 
or for good. With all his natural better in- 
stincts, and his internal superiority to gross vice, 
if he had fallen into bad hands, had his worser 
impulses been fostered by the influence of such 
associates as sporting lads generally meet with, 
— it might have been that even he would have 
sunk down into all that was debasing; for 
others as pure, as manly, and as innocent, have 
thus been corrupted, — "strong men" have 
been wounded and slain by "the sins of their 
youth." His natural force of character was 
such that it was once said of him, "he never 
was a child, — he was a man in petticoats." 
Force and will are not in themselves neces- 
sarily virtuous. Many of the most decided and 
earnest of men have been bad. Strength, 
power, determination, daring, are all good, if 
well directed, — by a soul filled with light from 
on high, purified from the flesh, and liberated 
from the downward domination of evil. In 
themselves they are capable of contrary action, 
like great natural or scientific forces ; like fire, 
that may comfort or consume ; rain, that may 
fertilize or inundate ; the wheel, whose motion 



34 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

may regulate the machinery or whirl it to 
atoms ; the powder, that may blast and shatter 
the rock, and thus remove obstacles and ad- 
vance civilization, or that may direct the mur- 
derous bullet of the assassin, or blow the inhab- 
itants of a city into the air. He who in child- 
hood was never a child certainly might, in his 
sixteenth year, have shown that he could be in 
reckless liberty a man. But he was saved 
from the dangers that then surrounded him, 
partly, we admit, by something inherently 
noble in himself, but principally by a new set 
of influences from without, which came upon 
him like light from heaven, revealed him to 
himself, and revealed to him also a vision of 
another and a higher world, even in this, than 
any of which he had yet dreamed. This was 
the grand turning-point in Sir Fowell Buxton's 
life. It was the taking up of the raw material 
of his inward being into a new loom of elabo- 
rate construction, to be worked into a web of 
finer texture, and to have its colors disposed 
by delicate hands into a more splendid and per- 
fect pattern than had yet been designed. It 
was the giving to his strong general power a 
right direction and noble aim. It was this that, 
more than anything else, shaped and moulded 
the future man, after he had received that sub- 
stantial strength which fitted him to bear, and 
enabled him to meet, to welcome and reward. 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 35 

the influences and the agents of the mighty 
change. To this crisis of Sir Fowell Buxton's 
history, which he ever acknowledged as the 
point where Providence most conspicuously 
met him, by bringing him in contact with 
those to whom, under God, was due from him 
the greatest debt of gratitude he owed, we 
now advance, as the second thing which con- 
tributed to make and keep him what he was. 

II. In advancing to this second particular, I 
should like to explain — which perhaps I ought 
to have done sooner — -my own views of the 
position I now occupy, and the work I have 
set myself to do. I am not here exclusively in 
my official character. We are not a church. 
We do not meet for worship, though we deem 
it right to begin by supplicating the Divine 
blessing. I am not standing up at present to 
preach the Gospel, nor to address you on spir- 
itual and supernatural truth, — in the way, at 
least, in which that should be done in connec- 
tion with our Sunday solemnities. There are 
seasons of which it is your duty to avail your- 
selves, and places to which you should regu- 
larly resort, when and where worship is con- 
ducted and instruction given, the direct aim of 
which is, the impression on the conscience of 
Divine things, and the nurture in the soul of 
the Divine life. In lectures like these, it is 
rather our object either so to interest the intel- 



36 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

lect by science, history, literature, or general 
aspects of philosophical and Biblical truth, as 
to promote amongst you those mental habits, to 
direct and stimulate those tastes, which may 
be auxiliary to a high religious and moral pur- 
pose ; or, as in the present case, to investigate 
a character, or depict the " story of a life," 
which, .while it will include many things bear- 
ing on the spiritualities of the next world, will 
yet derive much of its interest from its having 
to do with the business and the pleasures of 
this ; — with the incident and enterprise, — the 
fears, affections, hopes, disappointments, — the 
successes, connections, — the secular virtues, 
and the minor morals as well as others, — 
which belong to our present, earthly, every- 
day existence. Many things may be referred 
to here, which are excluded from the pulpit; 
and many lessons given, and many subjects of 
thought started, which it would not do to put 
into a sermon, but which may be very import- 
ant, nevertheless, for young men, whom, in a 
good sense, we wish to be " men of the world" 
as really as we wish them to be Christians in 
the highest and the best. I believe it to be the 
Divine idea and will, that men — that is to say, 
that you young men, now here — • should make 
the best of both worlds ; that everything belong- 
ing to you, your faculties and affections, your 
powers of varied and vigorous action, and of 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 37 

purified and virtuous enjoyment, in relation to 
the "life that now is," should all be called 
forth, and should meet their fitting exercise and 
reward, as well as those deeper capabilities of 
your being which belong to that "life which is 
to come." I shall not hesitate, therefore, to 
introduce, and to request you to mark, learn, 
remember, and digest, many things that may 
only contain hits and monitions of a purely 
prudential and secular sort. All men and wo- 
men are essentially the same ; — the same great 
crises await every one and are alike to all ; — 
the same inward awakening, the same outward 
warfare., the same mysterious, moulding influ- 
ences springing up in the inner man, or coming 
down from event and circumstance. • The 
same solid, substantial stuff of which the real 
essence of life consists, — the experience, vicis- 
situdes, duties, dangers, of this mortal state, — 
belongs equally to all ranks and all classes. 
He who "fashioneth the hearts of men alike" 
has given one essentially similar to the queen 
on the throne and the maiden in the meadow ; 
— the one holds the sceptre and the other han- 
dles a rake, but both have within them, simply 
as beings and creatures of this life, what makes 
them more really one than all that is external 
can make them two. So, whatever be the posi- 
tion of any individual portrayed before yon, — 
whatever his birth or patrimony, his education 
4 



38 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

or talents, the theatre of his exertions or the 
compass of his fame, the business he transacts, 
the things he achieves, the society he belongs 
to or into which he is introduced, the men and 
women to whom he becomes attached or who 
attach themselves to him. — everything, in short, 
that affects his character and influences his 
destiny, — in all these, there may be a princi- 
ple lying, a point involved, commo?i to every 07ie 
of you with him. The youth behind the coun- 
ter, the clerk at the desk, the warehouseman in 
his room, may all feel themselves on the same 
ground with the student at his books, the com- 
mander in the field, the minister in the senate, 
or the artist or author, with his chisel, his 
brush, his palette, or his pen. So, also, as to 
the practical philosophy of life. The incidents 
and events which stir the elements of incipient 
manhood, which awaken passion, occasion 
perils, arouse energy, demand prudence, excite, 
debase, or purify ambition, together with what- 
ever tasks the heart, soul, hand, in the prosecu- 
tion of man's daily "battle and war," — all this 
is substantially the same in peer and peasant, 
and may be so set forth, in the history of those 
who have moved the world and "stood before 
kings," as to admonish and instruct the Man- 
chester traveller or London apprentice, the 
shopman or compositor, the son alike of the 
porter and the principal, the engineer, the 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 39 

schoolmaster, the carpenter at the bench, or the 
weaver at the loom. Of course, I consider that 
you young men, as men, may get much good 
by looking thoughtfully at the dawn and devel- 
opment of Sir Fowell Buxton's early manhood, 
though you do not move, and never may move, 
in the same circle that he did; and that, as 
those who are to work with head or hands, you 
may derive many profitable lessons from his 
life, though you may not very confidently an- 
ticipate either keeping a carriage or sitting in 
parliament. Now, observe, it is not so much 
my intention to draw these practical inferences 
for you, as to try so to state facts and to con- 
nect or depict circumstances, that you may 
see the lessons you should learn, and learn 
them. 

We now proceed, then, to the grand crisis in 
Sir Fowell Buxton's life. This was his intro- 
duction, as a youth, through a boyish friend- 
ship with one of its members, to a remarkable 
and accomplished family. He had become 
acquainted with John Gurney, the eldest son of 
John Gurney, Esq., of Earlham Hall, near 
Norwich. He was invited thither, on a visit, 
and went. He found himself in a new world. 
Mr. Gurney had eleven children, all of them, 
at this time, at home. There were three elder 
daughters; John, Buxton's friend; then a group 
of four girls, about Buxton's own age; and 



40 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

lastly, three younger boys. The father had, for 
several years, been a widower. He was by 
profession a Friend, — but not very strict. His 
worldly position, and long widowhood, — his 
going into society, and his home hospitalities, 
— his connection with the literary and the fash- 
ionable, on the one side, and with " the straitest 
sect of our religion," on the other — had, alto- 
gether, a striking effect on the family circle. 
The members of it were all persons of superior 
minds — especially the women. One of the 
elder daughters was already under the influence 
both of religion and Quakerism; the others 
were somewhat gay in their habits; all were 
intellectual. Music, dancing, and drawing, 
were among their accomplishments; but they 
were zealously devoted to the higher forms of 
self-culture, and were strenuous in their endeav- 
ors to acquire knowledge, and to strengthen 
their understandings. There would be signs, I 
should think, in the doings, and dress, and dai- 
ly life, of this extraordinary family, indicative 
of the two spheres to which they belonged. 
There might be something present, or absent, 
here and there, about their apparel, that just 
served to show whence they came, and to 
give increased interest to what they were. 
There might be little things, in their modes of 
address and manners towards each other, start- 
lingly beautiful as " not of the world,'' while 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 41 

yet, at the same time, that glow and sunlight 
of earth's gay morning that is of the world sat 
on their brow, and was bright about them. 
They went a good deal into society, and their 
power to interest and please would lose nothing, 
I am persuaded, by the slight tinge of the 
Quaker element that they might carry with 
them. At home, all were zealously occupied in 
self-education. The younger boys, even, sym- 
pathized with their sisters, and the whole circle 
were full of energy in the pursuit of knowl- 
edge, and the conquest of difficulties. They 
were alike hearty in their play and work, their 
amusements and their studies, — in the exercise 
of the accomplishments that adorn life, as in 
the acquisition of knowledge, and the culture 
and discipline of their best faculties. Sketch- 
ing and reading in the park, under the shadow 
of its old trees, — "their custom, often, in an 
afternoon ; " — their excursions on foot, — their 
long days spent in the woods, gathering wild- 
flowers, which, though in sport they might 
decorate the bonnet, were intended in earnest- 
ness to instruct in botany ; their long, dashing 
rides on horseback; their conversation on an 
evening in the old hall ; their one day dining 
out with a lord, and their receiviug on another 
the visit of a prince; their being equally at 
home with an artist in his studio, an author 
with his book, or an officer at a ball ; — why, 



42 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

all these things, to our raw, rude Devonshire 
lad, made Earlham Hall a scene of enchant- 
ment. Captivated and delighted, however, — 
dazzled and entranced, as he unquestionably 
was, by what he saw in his fair associates, 
the great point, to be observed is, that their 
mental exercises and intellectual pursuits, their 
intelligence and taste, their aspirations and 
aims after self-improvement, were the sources 
of the influence they exercised over him, and 
of the manly character of the sympathy they 
excited. He became a new man. Intellectual 
tastes and energies were awakened. Studious 
habits were instantly formed. A course of 
classical reading commenced. A laudable am- 
bition was enkindled and sustained, which 
superseded his fondness for the field and the 
gun. It was, intellectually , "a renewing of the 
mind," — "a being born again," — " a conver- 
sion," — a sudden transition "from death to 
life, and from darkness to light," — " old things 
passed away, all things became new." From 
the moment that he was subjected to a highly 
gifted intellectual influence, his whole mental 
being underwent a change. He proceeded to 
Earlham a great, idle lad, of sporting propen- 
sities, and desultory habits ; he left it in pur- 
pose and pursuits a man. He lived longer in that 
month than he had seemed to do in previous 
years, or than he could ever do again in the 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 43 

same period, except, indeed, in experiencing 
another and a higher birth. " I know no bless- 
ing," he says, "of a temporal nature, for which 
I ought to render so many thanks, as my con- 
nection with the Earlham family. It has given 
a color to my life. Its influence was most pos-. 
itive and pregnant with good, at that critical 
period between school and manhood. They 
were eager for improvement — / caught the 
infection. I was resolved to please them, and 
in the college at Dublin, at a distance from all 
my friends, and all control, their influence kept 
me hard at my books, and sweetened the toil 
they gave. The distinctions I gained (little 
valuable as distinctions, but valuable, because 
habits of industry, perseverance and reflection, 
were necessary to obtain them) were exclu- 
sively the result of the animating passion in my 
mind, to carry back to them the prizes which 
they prompted and enabled me to win." 

Now, you must observe here, that if the boy 
Buxton had been naturally of a gross, ignoble 
nature, — or if he had contracted low tastes and 
vicious habits, and had really been at home 
in vulgar society, — this bursting upon him of 
the refined and elegant, the lofty and the beau- 
tiful, would have ruined him. He would have 
been out of his element ; would have felt every 
ray of intelligence as a detection or a reproach ; 
would have been mortified and abashed, stung 



44 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

and exasperated, or just stupidly uneasy until 
he could have stolen away from the companions 
whose tastes and accomplishments reproved 
him, and have found more appropriate asso- 
ciates in the stable or the inn. But the new 
influences operated otherwise, because they 
were congenial with what lay below in the 
interior regions of his being, and that only 
wanted what they brought to be developed and 
displayed. It is to the credit of the lad's own 
nature that it was worthy to be subjected to 
such an external test, and that it awoke at the 
touch, even as a spirit rises at the call of God ; 
and it is to the credit of the Earlham circle, 
that they guessed the richness of the rude ma- 
terial submitted to their inspection ; perceived 
or divined its inherent qualities; and, instead 
of treating it with neglect, and leaving it in its 
rudeness as something not likely to repay the 
cost of working, strove to refine, and shape, 
and, fashion it, with a faith and hope which 
their instincts inspired, their reason justified, 
and time fulfilled. Once thoroughly under the 
influence of cultivated and lofty souls, Buxton's 
better nature struggled upwards, and he became 
conscious that he was born for higher things, 
and might be something nobler and greater than 
he had yet dreamed of. The spirit testified 
within him, " You also might do that : — ' it is 
high time to awake out of sleep : ' " — and the 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 45 

manly heart purposed and replied, "I might — 
and I will. By His help, without whom I have 
always been taught nothing is stable, and 
nothing strong, I will plan, and attempt, and 
persevere, and achieve. I will 'put away 
childish things,' and abandon perilous pleas- 
ures; and I will study, and straggle, and 
work, and climb, till I have done some justice 
to the nature and faculties given me by God, 
and can be welcomed as an equal by those 
whose present superiority to myself awakens 
at once my regret and my ambition." It was 
thus that Buxton approached and passed the 
crisis of his life. The account is pregnant 
with instruction to you, young men, as illustra- 
tive of those seeds of things that may possi- 
bly lie in the very first intimate friendship you 
form ; — in the character of your acquaintance, 
and your first visit to the family of your friend; 
and, if it should be supposed that even at this 
early stage of his new mental existence, our 
hero's half-formed thoughts, and unintelligible 
impulses, whispered to him, in a sort of inartic- 
ulate language, something about becoming 
worthy of eminent worth, — why, the lessons 
to be learned, of caution and care, in respect to 
those intimacies which may operate so mightily 
for good or evil, are only the more obvious and 
the more distinct. 

The consequence of this infusion of a new 



46 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

and higher life into Buxton's mind was, that 
he soon and willingly prepared to go to college. 
He entered Dublin university. When he first 
began to study with a private tutor, preparatory 
to this, he found himself behind most of his 
associates; but by resolute application, and 
determined perseverance, he soon overcame that 
disadvantage. At college, his course was a 
perpetual triumph. He triumphed over diffi- 
culties, he triumphed over others, he triumphed 
over himself. He took everything every year 
that it was possible for him to take. There 
was not a prize, a medal, a certificate, an honor, 
that he did not obtain. It was the same in a 
voluntary institution to which he belonged. 
He received, as a member of the Historical 
Society, an award of " remarkable thanks/' 
which, though provided for by law, there had 
never been an opportunity of presenting till he 
won and had them ! During the years that he 
was thus occupied, letters were forwarded to 
his mother in Devonshire, and his friends in 
Norfolk, announcing his success; and it is hard 
to say in whose heart there would be most 
gladness, — in hers whose maternal care had 
fostered his young strength, or in hers whose 
magic influence had given it its right direction. 
It is interesting to observe how invigorating and 
purifying were his Earlham affections : how 
playfully, when his last honor had been gained, 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 47 

he begins his letter with a sort of mock mourn- 
ing over his defeat, lamenting the loss of the 
certificate and of the gold medal, and then 
adding, "what is worse — to know that my 
Earlham visit, as it was the cause of my idle- 
ness, was the cause of my disgrace." Then 
bursting out — "Think how happy I must be 
to have to tell you, that my utmost examina- 
tionary hopes are realized, — that I have the 
certificate, and l Valde bene in omnibus] and, 
what is better, that I can ascribe my success to 
nothing but my Earlham visit! " It was thus 
that his friendship with a youth like himself led 
to such happy results ; — introduced him to 
influences which elevated and transformed his 
inner-self, — awoke his slumbering capacities, 
and presented to his reason and his heart, 
that which, all through the years of university 
conflict, he felt to be the inspirer of power 
within, — a star above, — and a goal before 
him! 

At the termination of his college course, Sir 
Fowell Buxton received the highest possible 
compliment to his character and ability, by 
being solicited to stand for the university, with 
the assurance of support, and the certainty of 
being returned to represent it in parliament. He 
took time to consider, which surprised some ; 
and, after considering, declined, — which sur- 
prised more. He never, however, regretted his 



48 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

determination ; and there can be no question 
that it was wise and right. He had lost his 
expected Irish estates, and his mother, by some 
unsuccessful speculations, had materially dimin- 
ished the family property. His worldly losses, 
while they enhanced the value of a request to 
represent the university, rendered public life 
less attractive, and private devotedness to a 
profession or to business more necessary. He 
returned to England. He received the hand of 
Hannah Gurney, — and looked round for some- 
thing to which to put forth his own, that he 
might labor like a man for himself and her. 
You have already seen in what manner he suc- 
ceeded in this, in the sketch formerly given of 
his visible, outward life. We shall now pro- 
ceed to a third thing, illustrative of the way in 
which he came to be what he was — furnished 
and fitted to do what he did. I shall conclude 
this part, however, of my address, with an 
extract from a letter of Sir Fowell Buxton to 
one of his sons, referring to the period of his 
life just reviewed. It is very appropriate, most 
characteristic, and contains some of those noble, 
manly utterances of his energetic soul, on which 
I principally rely for the good you are to get out 
of this lecture. 

" You arc now at that period of life in which 
you must make a turn to the right or the left. 
You must now give proofs of principle, deter- 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 49 

mutation, and strength of mind, — or you must 
sink, into idleness, and acquire the habits and 
character of a desultory, ineffective young man ; 
and if once you fall to that point, you will find 
it no easy matter to rise again. 

" I am sure that a young man may be very 
much what he pleases. In my own case, it was 
so. I left school, where I had learned little or 
nothing, about the age of fourteen. I spent 
the next year at home, learning to hunt and 
shoot. Then it was that the prospect of going 
to college opened upon me, and such thoughts 
as I have expressed in this letter occurred to 
my mind. I made my resolutions, and I acted 
up to them : I gave up all desultory reading — 
I never looked into a novel or a newspaper — I 
gave up shooting. During the five years I 
was in Ireland, I had the liberty of going when 
I pleased to a capital shooting-place. I never 
went but twice. In short, I considered every 
hour as precious, and I made everything bend 
to my determination not to be behind any of 
my companions, — and then / speedily passed 
from one species of character to another. I had 
been a boy fond of pleasure and idleness, read- 
ing only books of unprofitable entertainment — 
I became speedily a youth of steady habits of 
application, and of irresistible resolution. I soon 
gained the ground I had lost, and I found those 
things which were difficult and almost impossi- 



50 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

ble to my idleness, easy enough to my indus- 
try; and much of my happiness, and all my 
prosperity in life, have resulted from the change 
I m,ade at your age. If you seriously resolve 
to be energetic and industrious, depend upon it 
you will for your whole life have reason to 
rejoice that you were wise enough to form and 
to act upon that determination." 

III. In what has been submitted to you, you 
have seen two things. You have seen a mass 
of strong force, that might have yielded to bad 
influences as well as good, yielding itself to 
the good. So far, however, even this good, as 
to ultimate action, is only good potentially. 
Buxton in his early youth, and Buxton in his 
early manhood, alike consist of general energy ; 
only that, in the latter case, his intellectual 
development by university discipline has vastly 
increased his sum of power, — power, remem- 
ber, which may yet be used, so far as it is 
mere power, for good or evil. Trained and 
educated ability can do far more than that 
which is equal in degree, but untaught; its 
increased capacity, however, simply as such, 
may be wrongly directed, and come, in the end, 
to be capacity for mischief. You are next to 
see, then, in the course and progress of Sir 
Fowell Buxton, how his general power was 
not only subjected to a discipline that increased 
it, but how he himself voluntarily took it, when 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 51 

thus increased, and sedulously bent it to a spe- 
cific preparation for a specific course, — and 
that course, lofty and laudable. 

Though he once had thoughts of going to the 
bar, lie became, as you know, a man of business. 
Having passed the Rubicon and taken his 
course, he was out and out, fully and thorough- 
ly, what he professed to be. He entered with 
all his characteristic energy into "his station 
and its duties." Whatever he did, he did at the 
time " with all his might." When in business, 
business, very properly, was in him. For the 
hour or the day that it required his attention, 
he "gave himself wholly to it." Every bit of 
him, from the crown of his head to the sole 
of his foot — brain and hands — skill and 
strength, — when he had to work, did work: 
and sometimes he was at it from early morn- 
ing till late at night. But this was not fre- 
quent, or the necessity for it became less and 
less. At the same time, then, that he was thus 
often occupied during the day, he was finding 
opportunity, morning or evening, for devotion 
to books. It was not possible that one who 
had actually been asked to represent a learned 
university in parliament, — asked as no empty 
compliment, but in serious earnestness, — by 
men, as he acknowledged to himself, "of 
thought and education, honor and principle, — 
his companions and competitors, who had 



52 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

known him and observed him for years," — it 
was not possible but that he should be alive to 
the thought of the possibility, at least, of the 
House of Commons being his destination. He 
was willing, therefore, to avail himself of all 
the advantages he had previously enjoyed, and 
to put himself through a designed and elabo- 
rate preparation for public life. Without neg- 
lecting any duties at Spitalfields, he studied 
hard to fit himself for St. Stephen's. He read 
extensively in English literature ; he digested 
Blackstone, and got some considerable inkling 
of law; he went through Montesquieu, and 
meditated on its general principles as a science ; 
he studied political economy and kindred sub- 
jects ; and thus, by the diligent improvement of 
"the intervals of business," he labored to acquire 
so much, and such varied though related, 
knowledge, that if ever called to go into parlia- 
ment, he might not have to refuse from con- 
scious unfitness, — have his qualifications to 
seek at the moment, — or all his life have to 
cram and read for subjects as they rose. 

His maxims of study were like himself. The 
principle that pervades them may be applied by 
you, not only to studies of a literary sort, but to 
anything in business that demands force and 
fixedness of attention. They were these : 
"Never to begin a book without finishing it; " 
"never to consider a book finished till it is 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 53 

mastered;" and "to study everything with a 
u-ho/e mind. 31 Now, I want you to remember 
that this " whole-mindedness " was one of the 
most remarkable things about Sir Fowell Bux- 
ton, and one of the great secrets of his success 
in life. Whatever he thought worth doing at 
all, he thought worth doing well. He was 
hearty, earnest, fixed, united; — his whole soul, 
as it were, was knit and compressed together, 
and bent and concentrated on the point before 
him. He could be attracted for the time by 
nothing else. He was equally thus in his busi- 
ness and at his books. " I could brew," he 
says, "one hour; — do mathematics the next; 

— and shoot the next; — and each with my 
whole stmV The reading of such a man was 
not something between waking and sleeping, or 
thinking and dreaming; the reception of im- 
pressions made one moment to be obliterated 
the next; but a great and resolute work — a 
battle and a victory. The subject studied by 
the whole mind was taken up by the whole 
mind. All the faculties apprehended and had 
it; it was their common property, and was 
passed with facility from one to another as a 
familiar thing: — the memory suggesting it to 
the reason ; — the reason handing it to the 
fancy; — the fancy throwing it to the passions; 

— till it came out in language from the lips — 
plain or polished, cut by logic or colored by 

5* 



54 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

imagery — as might Lest serve the purpose of 
its possessor. By this mental entiraness — this 
throwing of himself in all the strength ami 
bulk of his whole being right down upon his 
subject, he thoroughly mastered it. It was 
henceforth his. It was hard work, however, 
remember. He owed nothing to "genius" in 
anything he did, and nothing to " inspiration " 
in anything he uttered. He had no faith in 
either, for public men; — and he knew that ho 
had neither to trust to, himself. He never 
trusted to them; or if ever he did, he was 
ashamed of the presumption. He early ob- 
tained and encouraged the belief, that he could 
do as well as others, if he gave double the tinw 
and labor to the attempt ! A very modest, but 
a very safe and salutary, persuasion ! It was 
thus he worked and labored in London, when 
first settled in business there, that his natural 
energy, increased in force and in capacity for 
action by his college studies, might become 
charged, so to speak, with all those elements 
that would make it a genial and beneficial 
power. Whether he really knew it or not, 
there was that in him which might affect many, 
and he was taking sedulously such a course, 
that out of him might come, at a future day, 
light to illumine instead of lightning to destroy! 
Whatever you may think, there is much in 
all this to suggest what is useful and practical 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 55 

to you. It is not necessary to go to college to 
have within you disciplined and pliable force. 
It is true, that a thorough university education 
gives a man an inestimable advantage; still, 
many of you have had advantages at school 
fully sufficient to fit you for life, and to put you 
in possession of the power of vigorous self-cul- 
ture. It is this, after all, that, in the long run, 
makes the greatest differences between man and 
man. Neither school nor college are intended 
or fitted to finish the education. The discipline 
of both is not so much designed to give to any 
one actual knowledge — to set him up on a 
stock of ideas — as to impart power ; to draw 
out and exercise the faculties, to sharpen and 
brace them, — to make them at once firm and 
nimble, vigorous and elastic ; and thus to pre- 
pare him for future acquisitions. Your classics 
and mathematics, your arithmetic and grammar, 
are not so much intended to give you a fulness 
or variety of knowledge, as to give you the 
capacity to get it for yourselves : and in propor- 
tion to the extent and severity of the discipline 
through which an individual has passed, it is 
supposed that he will be able to select it wisely, 
to acquire it quickly, to retain it firmly, to use 
it rightly — and to do all this, — and to do it in 
relation to trade and business — to buying and 
selling, as well as other things, — better than 
those who have not had educational advan- 



56 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

tages, or who left study when they left school. 
Sir Fowell Buxton stuck to business, and 
brought to bear upon it the cultivated force of a 
thoroughly developed and disciplined under- 
standing; but he found time also to preserve 
and enlarge his acquaintance with books; — 
and neither interfered with or injured the other. 
He was thus fitting himself for a 2>ossible posi- 
tion in which he might be placed ; but, had he 
never attained that, he was adding to his 
resources of self-enjoyment, and increasing his 
ability to serve and please. There are many 
of you, who, as far as the principle goes, may 
do likewise. You have had care and culture 
bestowed upon you, that would enable you, in 
your place, to follow the example. Let the 
idle and frivolous frequent theatres,* and be 
found in casinoes; — do you study to be dili- 
gent in business in the hours of labor, — those 
that are your own devote manfully to self-cul- 
ture — to all that will give respectability to 
character, capacitate for future social useful- 
ness, or enlarge your power in those particular 
branches of business, and those immediate 
forms of duty, which God in his providence 
has made yours. Think of Buxton, brewing 

* The author has particular reasons for saying that the view he 
takes of the great objection to the theatre may be seen in a lec- 
ture by him on the subject, delivered many years ago, but still to 
be had, he believes, at either " The Pulpit," or "Penny Pulpit," 
office. 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 57 

away there, like a man who felt that he had 
his family to keep, and yet reading and think- 
ing like one who would "intermeddle with all 
knowledge." There he is, — doing this at your 
age. Two-and-twenty — three-and-twenty — 
four-and-twenty — and so on, up to thirty and 
two-and-thirty, when he entered parliament. 
Energy and education — two things in him 
meeting together, and making a third — volun- 
tary and devoted self-equipment for the pros- 
pective duties of a possible responsibility. Why, 
there are many of you that may look forward, 
and that are looking forward, to as great a rise, 
in your circumstances, as going into parliament 
was in his; — you should never forget that it 
not only becomes you to prepare and fit your- 
selves for all that may be included in that 
advancement, but that to be prepared for it will 
be just the thing that will make it yours. In 
matters of trade, — in the rise of a man from 
the door to the desk, from the counter as a serv- 
ant to the counting-house as a partner, — it is 
just the same as in war or politics, gaining a 
command or governing the House, — the tools 
will come to the hand that can handle them. 

IV. As, in the youth Buxton, rude force was 
transformed and elevated into disciplined capa- 
city ; so, in the man, as we have now seen, that 
capacity was further fitted for ultimate action, 
by being furnished with the materials of a use- 



58 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

ful and patriotic public career. That career, 
however, might have shaped itself in many- 
ways; — his general preparation for it might 
have been available, whatever the objects to 
which he became devoted. But he became de- 
voted to a particular class of things ; — a certain 
course was emphatically his ; — and the next 
point, therefore, with us, comes to be, how was 
it that his general energy, capacity, and prepa- 
ration for parliamentary life, all happened to 
take that course ? — how far was he independ- 
ently prompted from within by original and 
spontaneous impulses; — how far affected and 
influenced from without by events or agents 
that, consciously or unconsciously, mapped for 
him his mission and shaped his path? Some- 
thing of each of these things, more or less, 
determines the doings and the destiny of us all. 
We have heard, you know, a great deal, for 
some years past, about " heroes" and" hero- 
worship." The term "'hero" has become a 
sort of stereotyped phrase for any distinguished 
or noticeable person; — one, that is to say, who 
is either such a " doer " as to draw attention by 
his acts, or such a "thinker" as to be the 
cause of thinkings and doings in others. Now, 
there are two theories about the birth and pa- 
rentage of the ' ' great man ; " — how your ' • hero ' ' 
comes to be produced ; — the things that deter- 
mine his advent, and that make him what he 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 59 

is. A glance at this matter .will by no means be 
ont of place here. One writer, then, says, "that 
the history of the world is the history of its 
gr.sat men:" — another, "that great men are 
the representatives of their age." The differ- 
ence between the statements comes to this, — 
that, in the one case, the great man makes the 
age, and, in the other, the age makes the great 
man. In one case, an individual mind impresses 
itself on its generation, moulds it, makes it what 
it is, or is, in itself, what future generations will 
come to be; — in the other case, the character- 
istic spirit of a period, the predominating, general 
mind pervading society at a particular crisis, is 
couceutrated and rendered visible in an indi- 
vidual. ---finds thus embodiment and utterance; 
and, in him, as an image of itself, holds up and 
shows itself to all coming time. I really think 
there is some truth in both these representations. 
Some men have more of the one element in 
them, — some of the other ; no one can be made 
exclusively of either. He who is most strongly 
"a Ihing apart," — a man a-head of his age by 
his inwaid aspirations, or above it by his power 
and his achievement's, must have derived some- 
thing from it, and possess something in common 
with it, to be able to impress or influence it at 
all ; and he who does anything worthy of re- 
membrance, and is held as a hero by his gen- 
eration or his class, (at least, if he is so held by 



60 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

other classes and other times,) will always be 
found to have something about him in which 
he is superior to those very people, his sympa- 
thy with whom, and his representation of whose 
form and image as in a mirror, constitute his 
specific claim to distinction. The first class 
hero, — he whom you Avould designate in the 
city " A. 1," — is, of course, the man who soli- 
tarily originates some great idea, — who enun- 
ciates it — perhaps to a listless generation; — 
but who goes on working away at his testi- 
mony or purpose, till the leaven spreads and the 
mass is leavened. He, however, may die long 
before this result has come to pass; — but, ill 
the passage and the progress towards it, many 
are the opportunities for the appearance of he- 
roes of the second and third degrees ; — that is, 
of those who are born to an inheritance of 
thought and feeling already existing and in the 
course of progress, — but who, while thus in- 
debted to others for an idea or an aim, receive 
it with deeper sympathy, and pursue it with 
intenser earnestness, than the mass of their 
contemporaries, — enlist, in consequence, more 
in the pursuit, revive believers or make con- 
verts, and so carry forward the cause and the 
community that the truth is at last universally 
admitted, or the thing proposed is consented to 
and done. When this result is fully arrived at, 
the heroic element, in respect to that thing, has 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 61 

ceased. It has become the common property 
of the race, a familiar and ordinary matter; 
and, to think this, to approve that, or to know 
the other, — to think, to approve, or to know 
which, might, at one time, have been to endan- 
ger life, to forfeit or to found a reputation, — 
may be no more accounted of than those ac- 
complishments which are common now, but 
which once were frequently wanting both in 
lord barons and lord bishops. 

Now, it is no disparagement to Sir Fowell 
Buxton to say, that so far as we claim for him 
a degree of greatness, or the epithet "great,"' 
we are quite content that, though unques- 
tionably in his sphere a leader, he shall yet be 
regarded as one of the following, rather than 
of the originating, class of heroic men. He 
was not the father or founder of the cause he 
served ; — but he served it as few others com- 
paratively did, and had much to do in giving it 
depth, diffusion, popularity, success. I know 
not, indeed, that he would have been its parent, 
had it not been born into the world before him, 
nor how far his unaided meditations or spon- 
taneous impulses would have created for them- 
selves original forms of utterance or action ; — 
it is enough to acknowledge that he was the 
man of his day, his class, and his connections. 
He imbibed a spirit, and sympathized in an 
enterprise, which was produced and projected 
6 



62 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

by other minds. He was surrounded by foun- 
tains of feeling and thought, in his providen- 
tial position, which were all adapted to awaken 
and sustain those particular purposes which he 
formed and executed as a public man. But 
his inherent sympathies with suffering were 
strong; — his instinctive hostility to fraud and 
injustice had the firmness of a principle and the 
force of a passion. His resolution and magna- 
nimity ; — his very real, though unimpetuous, 
enthusiasm ; — his resolute will ; — his deep 
feeling, intense, calm, unruffled, not expended, 
like that of some, in hysteric agitations, or 
evaporated in eloquent speech, but flowing on, 
full, silent, strong in its quietness, like the dew 
that falls on the fields, or the sap that rises in 
the trees; — these things all made him capable 
of serving any cause which he might take up, 
and predisposed him to select those that he 
adopted. Still, it was as the adopter and the 
carrier out of things, rather than as their origi- 
nator, that Sir Powell Buxton is to be described. 
He imbibed and represented the spirit of the 
class to which he belonged, — which came, 
indeed, and very materially through him, to be 
the spirit of the age; — he took up and inter- 
preted the mind of the times ; -- that which at 
first existed in a minority, he and his associates 
made general ; — he began with others, but he 
got sometimes first ; he advanced upon them ; 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 63 

he advanced upon himself; he was looked to 
as a leader as well as a colleague ; and had to 
strive occasionally to draw others along, or 
to stand still till they overtook him. But this 
was not always the case : nor was he ever so 
far before them as to distance his compeers. 
He was sometimes, indeed, quickened and stimu- 
lated by voices at his side, and had to spring up 
and stretch onward, taking advantage of their 
zeal and forwardness. Once or twice he was 
even regarded as behind his age. 

One truth is, then, that Sir Fowell Buxton 
threw his force into channels already opened 
by his times; and another truth is, that his 
doing that was the result of influences which 
had their source in his natural and acquired 
connections, — in his religious and sectarian 
associations, — but most of all which sprang 
up, pure, benign, omnipotent, within the sacred 
enclosure of his domestic life. I am obliged to 
return again to the grand lesson which the book 
before' us holds up to every young man, — the 
•mighty and moulding influence which those 
intimacies which he forms with others may exert 
over him. They not only affected Sir Fowell 
Buxton's personal happiness, character, and 
habits, but they determined his whole course, 
colored his entire being, made him what he was 
as a public man, sustained and strengthened 
his zeal and philanthropy, and presented to his 



64 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

mind those who, next to God, at once inspired 
his efforts and rewarded them. 

Sir Fowell Buxton was the son of a Quaker- 
ess, who early instilled into his mind hostility 
to the slave-trade, and pity for the slave. The 
Gurney family were by descent " Friends,' ' 
though at the time of Sir Fowell's introduction 
to them they mixed pretty freely with the 
world. In spite of this, however, — from their 
parentage and education, their intercourse with 
ministers and members of the Society, and the 
essential congeniality between the minds and 
impulses of intelligent and ardent young women 
and the humane and benevolent spirit of Quaker- 
ism — it could not but have happened that the 
inmates of Earlham Hall must have had amongst 
them forms of opinion, sympathies and aspira- 
tions, that would be to Buxton's soul as water 
to the seed sown by his mother. Though Bux- 
ton, by his father's side, belonged to the Church 
of England, it is evident, from his Dublin let- 
ters, that his Quaker connections had already 
obtained such power over him as to infuse 
doubts into his mind about the propriety of 
bearing arms and the lawfulness of taking an 
oath. Before he settled in London, his religious 
feelings had acquired great strength, and, as we 
shall see, derived nourishment alike from the 
Friends' Meeting and the Established Church; 
— the consequence was, that he was led into 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 65 

intercourse with good men of different denomi- 
nations, and received some characteristic im- 
pulse from all, Evangelical churchism inter- 
ested him in missions and in Bible societies, 
and fell in with the primary teaching of his 
parent ; while, as half a Quaker by birth, and 
a little more by breeding, and still more by 
friendship and marriage, he was brought into 
connection with William Allen, and men of 
that stamp ; got interested in schools and 
benevolent institutions ; and was exposed to all 
that would foster sympathy with suffering 
humanity — with the cause of the poor, the 
prisoner, and the slave. His father, indeed, as 
I formerly mentioned, had, when sheriff of the 
county, paid particular attention to the condi- 
tion of the gaols ; a circumstance which I sup- 
posed would not be forgotten in the maternal 
attempts to breathe a benevolent soul into the 
son: but Mrs. Fry, that son's sister-in-law, 
became conspicuous for her philanthropy in 
that direction ; and there can be no doubt that 
her example had its effect in strengthening and 
quickening his thoughts and purposes, and 
impelling his mind towards prison discipline 
and the criminal law. Then, there was Joseph 
John Gurney, one of the Earlham boys, who 
grew up into a devout and distinguished man ; 
a person of excellent parts and finished educa- 
tion ; an eminent Christian and philanthropist ; 
6* 



66 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

a minister among the Friends, and himself the 
friend of every pious and good work. From 
the specimens of his letters given in the " Life," 
it is very evident that Buxton had in him a 
guide, a counsellor, a colleague and a judge ; — 
one who stood by, ready to aid by purse or 
pen ; — looking on, watching the combat, sym- 
pathizing with his relative in his discourage- 
ments and his success ; wafting to him words 
of admonition or praise ; — and thus exerting 
an influence of which it was as honorable to 
be the subject as the source. The known ten- 
dencies of Sir Fowell Buxton induced Mr. Wil- 
berforce, when he invited him into parliament, 
to anticipate from him appropriate aid; the 
friendship of such a man would give power 
and fixedness to his previous purposes ; while 
these again, associated with his proved ability 
for parliamentary business, determined the 
choice of the retiring veteran, and led him to 
devolve on the rising advocate the management 
and leadership of the great cause. Lushing- 
ton, Macaulay, Brougham, Mackintosh, and 
other names of the living and the dead, might 
be mentioned as those of public individuals, 
who, with Buxton, mutually acted on and 
influenced each other. But the most powerful, 
the most constraining, the holiest and best, 
of the external impulses that touched and 
moved Sir Fowell Buxton — that to which he 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 67 

yielded with constant delight, and the source 
of whose potency lay in its pure and heavenly 
gentleness, in conjunction with the stirrings of 
his human love — was what came upon him 
in his own domestic circle, and from the more 
gifted of his family connections. Of several 
of his " sweet sisters " he speaks in terms of 
high respect; but for Priscilla Gurney — one of 
the gay Earlham group, who, like Mrs. Fry, 
gave up the world, devoted herself to God, and 
became a female minister among the Friends — 
his love and admiration are almost boundless. 
He speaks of her intellect as of the first order ; 
of her eloquence as uncommon, almost un- 
paralleled; of her character as the combina- 
tion of illustrious virtues. She died in 1821. 
During her illness she repeatedly sent for Bux- 
ton, "urging him to make the cause and con- 
dition of the slaves the first object of his life." 
Her last act, or nearly her last, was an attempt 
to reiterate the solemn charge ; she almost 
expired in the ineffectual effort; — she could 
only indicate, in two or three feeble, broken 
words, what became the most sacred memory 
of the dead, and was cherished as her parting 
legacy by the living. It is distinctly stated, 
that it was one of the things to which he often 
referred, as preparing his mind for accepting 
the advocacy of the anti-slavery cause. He 
never, I believe, lost the impression, nor failed 



68 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

to be influenced and sustained by it. If it had 
been possible for him to have grown lukewarm 
or careless in the work which he had doubtless 
promised her to pursue, the spirit of the departed 
Priscilla Gurney would have seemed to con- 
front him, to reprove and stimulate his flagging 
zeal. 

Other and dearer individuals might be men- 
tioned, as agents in those animating home- 
influences to which, in the present case, the 
world has come to be so deeply indebted, and 
which is worthy of the distinct notice we are 
taking of it, from its supposed rareness in the 
domestic experience of great men. Men of 
what is denominated genius are represented as 
generally unhappy at home. It has been some- 
where said, that not a philosopher in fifty, nor 
a single poet in a hundred, ever marries like a 
man of sense. Nature, in themselves, is sup- 
posed to be against them ; and in others, often 
what is — not nature. Fortunately for Buxton, 
he was neither of the first two things just men- 
tioned, — or not in any transcendent degree, — 
and he was the third. Altogether, he was emi- 
nently favored in his fortunes. He had much 
in his own personal circumstances, in his 
parentage and education, in his thriving busi- 
ness, his advancement in the world, in his suc- 
cessful and honored public career, to satisfy the 
ordinary longings of humanity in relation to 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTONj BART. 69 

"the life that now is;" but still more was he 
happy and blessed in that one element, which 
outweighs and surpasses every other, and with- 
out which, to men like him, all the rest are as 
mere chaff, — he had entire, perfect compla- 
cency, an exultant and manly pride, in her 
who was to be ever and unalterably with him. 
Solaced by this, he was conscious of a buoy- 
ancy to which nothing was a burden. The 
living presence, and the direct power to stimu- 
late and repay, of all that was as much the 
object of respect and confidence as affection, — 
encouraged and aided his exertions by in- 
telligence, sanctified them by devotion, and 
shared and rewarded them by intellectual par- 
ticipation and sympathetic praise. It is true, 
he lived and worked — as we shall see pres- 
ently — "under his great Taskmaster's eye." 
By the thought of His "weighing" and "pon- 
dering" his steps was he primarily moved, and 
by the solace of his Spirit tranquillized and 
upheld. Fearing God, he feared nothing else ; 
realizing his judgment, he was raised superior 
to human opinion; and to be "approved of 
Him," he was faithful to the great public trust 
which the Supreme Disposer had made his. 
Still, in considering, as at present, the imme- 
diate external and secondary influences which 
made or sustained Sir Fowell Buxton, it is but 
just to the nature that God has given us, — to 



70 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

the benignant forces of our common humanity, 
to testify to the power of intelligent connections 
in moulding for the world its great men. To 
Buxton, his family circle was the world, so far 
as judge or audience was concerned. In their 
sight he acted; to them he spoke; their sym- 
pathy was enough — their suffrages sufficient. 
With them, and with the consciousness of right 
on his side, he could face anything; — sustain 
attacks, hear abuse, lose popularity, offend 
friends. Had they forsaken him, he would 
have suspected himself; it would have been 
impossible for him, in such circumstances, really 
to believe that he could be right. His soul was 
a reflection of the light and hues of the heaven 
that was over him ; — and he lived under it so 
joyously! — and looked up to it so often! — and 
thought within himself that no spot on earth 
was canopied like that on which his hearth 
stood, — and that no eye could rest anywhere 
on what surpassed the scene which surrounded 
him, and which sparkled and shone with the 
looks and smiles of a circle radiant with intel- 
ligence and goodness ! It is no disparagement 
to Sir Fowell Buxton that the Gurney family 
"colored his life;" or that his private affections 
so assisted to make him and keep him what he 
was. It is a fine thing, — a beautiful and holy 
sight, in this sad dislocated world, — that of a 
great-souled, heroic man, in a severe public 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 71 

conflict, refreshed and helped by the descent 
upon him of the soft but invigorating dew of 
the domestic charities. 

V. The tenor of these remarks naturally 
leads us to the last thing to be noticed about Sir 
Fowell Buxton, so far as the phenomena, or 
visible manifestations, of his character are con- 
cerned. We have spoken generally of its force, 
and we have shown you how that force was 
moulded and fashioned into a great, useful, 
working power. After what has been just 
said, you will be prepared for our next state- 
ment, — namely, that there was in Sir Fowell 
Buxton a remarkable combination of strength 
and tenderness — of the massive and beautiful. 
I can do nothing, I find, but merely hint at 
some of the illustrations of this, referring you to 
the volume for the fuller statement. 

As to Sir Fowell Buxton's firmness of pur- 
pose and force of character, we have already 
frequently referred to them as facts; — proofs of 
that inherent power they indicate, you will find 
plentifully scattered through the book. Why, 
just look at the title-page ; — you see the man 
in the motto that stands there, and the impres- 
sion, too, of his family respecting him. ''The 
longer I live, the more I am certain that the 
great difference between men, between the feeble 
and the powerful, the great and the insignifi- 
cant, is ENERGY— INVINCIBLE DETER- 



72 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

MINATION — a purpose once fixed, and then 
death or victory. That quality will do any- 
thing that can be done in this world ; — and no 

TALENTS, NO CIRCUMSTANCES, NO OPPORTUNITIES, 
WILL MAKE A TWO-LEGGED CREATURE A MAN 

without it." There; write that upon your 
souls, young men! Let it be a text on which 
you may preach to yourselves ; and take care 
to pay the preacher the best compliment that 
preachers can receive, — let your conduct, by 
embodying the text, do credit to the sermon. 
In going through the "Life" of Sir Fowell 
Buxton, you will see how strongly this energy 
was possessed by him, and what he did by it. 
Take a few examples: — When he was a mere 
boy it began to appear. Told to deliver a mes- 
sage to a pig-driver, away he went, by field or 
road, through mud and mire, guessing his way, 
as best he could, by the foot-marks of the herd, 
till he overtook the man and fulfilled his mis- 
sion. Look how resolutely he gave up every 
idle and desultory habit, when he awoke to 
duty and determined to be a scholar. Urged 
to play at billiards for a little recreation, by his 
college companions, he would not touch cue or 
ball, however persuaded, because he had pur- 
posed with himself that he would not. When 
he became a partner in Hanbury's concern, he 
saw that everything wanted reformation, and 
he resolved upon reform. One old stager was 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 73 

rather refractory — he could not fall in with 
new notions and revolutionary disturbance. 
"Meet me," said Buxton, "in the office to- 
morrow morning at six o'clock." When they 
met, he simply said, " Be so good as hand me 
your set of books; I intend in future to take 
charge of them myself." Opposition was at 
end. The seat of power and the force of ruling 
will were recognized and acknowledged, and 
order and obedience became matters of course. 
Only once, some long time afterwards, did the 
same individual betray a little of his original 
restiveness ; but it was quelled in a moment by 
Buxton's very quietly saying, "I think you had 
better meet me to-morrow morning at six 
o'clock !" 

The whole course of his preparation for par- 
liamentary life illustrated his vigor and perse- 
verance. In the progress of his public meas- 
ures, he was sometimes put to severe trials, in 
having to follow his personal judgment and to 
adhere to his own purposes, in spite of the 
opposition, or, what was far worse, the earnest 
entreaty, of his colleagues and friends. One of 
the finest moral pictures, — the resistance of the 
individual against united numbers, — the vic- 
tory of personal conviction, self-trust, adherence 
to the sense of obligation and right, over every 
sort of influence that could be brought to bear 
on inferior affections, — may be seen in Sir 
7 



74 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

Fowell Buxton's behavior in the House of 
Commons on a night when, in spite of all that 
his friends could urge, he was determined to 
push his point to a division. His unalterable 
purpose looked like dead, downright obstinacy: 
— as the most rational firmness always does, 
when it seems a reproach, or is an inconven- 
ience, to others. Some of Buxton's friends 
blamed the "obstinacy;" but the minister said, 
11 It had settled the question. 33 It is a happy 
thing when events justify what is adhered to 
under a painful sense of personal responsibility: 
though even disappointment would not destroy 
the complacency of a rationally decided man. 

The difference between Foster's wise man, 
and his stupid, gravitating "big stone" is, that 
one arrives at his result, thinks it out, and 
knows what he is after ; the other merely takes 
a thing into his head. There is false firmness, 
remember, as well as true ; or, rather, there is 
wrong-headedness as well as right. Be careful, 
therefore, so to cultivate your understandings, 
and to have such intelligent and intelligible 
grounds to go upon in your efforts after the 
virtue now recommended, that you may never 
be placed in the condition of the fool, who is 
said to be "wiser in his own conceit than seven 
men that can render a reason." 

The promptitude with which Sir Fowell Bux- 
ton acted was sometimes as conspicuous as his 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 75 

perseverance and constancy. Once, at the open- 
ing of parliament, when, contrary to expectation, 
no allusion was made in the king's speech to 
the subject of slavery, he went directly from 
the House of Lords to the Commons, and gave 
immediate notice of a motion. He was pres- 
ently joined by some of his friends, who assured 
him it was all right, — everything would be 
done, though nothing was said, — only they 
besought that nothing should be attempted on 
their side. " What ! not even to give notice of 
a motion?" " By no means — certainly not." 
u Bat it 's done" replied Buxton ; and so it was. 
And thus, by the promptitude of a determined 
and resolute will, an idea had become a fact, 
— a thing accomplished, — the mere suggestion 
of which, as an idea, surprised and startled the 
minds of others. A strong, massive, man-of- 
war-like soul, driving onwards in this way, 
like a floating fortress, right down upon its 
object, to the peril or alarm of smaller craft, 
had need to be well piloted to be safe ; and had 
need, too, to have other excellences to be loved. 
That Buxton had these, I propose to show. 

He was a strong, rock-like man; and to some, 
I can imagine, he might occasionally seem 
stern and forbidding. To those, however, who 
were habitually near him, he was embodied 
gentleness. The marble column stood in a 
garden, was surrounded with verdure, was 



76 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

crowned with flowers; plants of the loveliest 
hue, with tendrils of delicate texture, wound 
themselves about it, — found in it affinity, and 
drew from it nourishment. Like the rock 
struck by the prophet, he could send forth, from 
his inner self, living water, — sparkling as the 
glance of a child, clear as purity of heart, sweet 
as goodness and love ! From his physical 
stature — he was six feet four — he. was called 
by his school-fellows " Elephant Buxton ;" but 
it used to be remarked of him, that along with 
the animal's gigantic bulk, he possessed and 
displayed its characteristic gentleness. You 
will notice, in perusing the volume, numberless 
proofs of the qualities I refer to ; some of them, 
indeed, indicating or illustrating other virtues. 
We are concerned at present, however, exclu- 
sively with those I have now mentioned. 

All I can do here is to intimate the facts that 
sustain the statements just made. Not to men- 
tion his filial respect and tenderness, look for 
a moment at his fraternal affection. He lost 
two brothers. His conduct to the one, and his 
admiration of the other, alike evince his good- 
ness of heart. The first was a wild, wayward 
lad. He went to sea ; was taken ill in India ; 
returned a wreck : reached England just in 
time to get ashore — to enter an hospital — and 
to die. The eagerness with which Buxton 
hastened down to the poor youth; his deep 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 77 

love, his intelligent religious teaching, his ten- 
derness and tears, are instructive and affecting 
in the highest degree. Then, the effect of his 
conduct, and the influence of his character, on 
all that were about him, may be noticed with 
advantage. He was the stay and strengthener 
of his mother in her sorrow ; his sister could 
spare time from her own grief to express her 
admiration of his manly deportment and many 
virtues. He was a young man, mind, of twen- 
ty-five. At an age when many are thoughtless 
and vain — light in their deportment, and sel- 
fish in their pleasures — he was the support of 
his whole family in their affliction, and moved 
among its members like a father in wisdom, a 
patriarch in authority, and a woman in his love. 
The other brother died some years later, in 
happier circumstances, with maturer faith and 
brighter aspirations, — though the first died not 
without penitence nor without hope. Sir Fow- 
ell Buxton had the highest opinion of the tal- 
ents, disposition and piety, of the elder brother. 
His references to him glow with love. His 
early fate was long mourned. His death seems 
to have been felt like a dark cloud veiling for a 
while the sun, and casting a cold shadow on 
the earth ; but the remembered character of the 
dead, and the Christian faith of the living, in- 
spired the assurance that the side of the cloud 
next the sky was bright as burnished silver. 
7* 



78 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

Happy are the brothers that so live, that when 
one is snatched by death from the other, the 
expressions uttered in the service at the grave 
can be intelligently felt to be "spirit and life," 
instead of being dreaded as a falsehood or a 
form ! * 

Then, there is the deep and exquisite feeling 
with which Sir Fowell Buxton regarded Pris- 
cilla Gurney, and other members of that circle. 
Observe, too, his interest in young people; his 
sympathy with them in their pleasures ; his 
participation of their amusements ; his anxiety 
to see them happy; his readiness to ride or shoot 
with them in a morning, and to suggest to them 
words for their charades at night. But his de- 
light in children ! This is always the indica- 
tion of a genial nature — a pure, unworn, and 
unselfish heart. " Never," says Lavater, "make 
that man your friend, who hates bread, music, 
or the laugh of a child." Certainly to hate any 
of these would be very bad. 

I think I could even explain the philosophy 
of the first. There may be something of insen- 
sibility to the second, without amounting to 
positive dislike, that may not materially affect 
the character — as in the case of our friend 



* Sir Fowell Buxton twice refers to the comfort he felt in hear- 
ing the words of the burial service, as he understood them to 
express the persuasion of survivors with respect to the actual 
bliss of the departed. 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 79 

before us ; but, if the gleeful, leaping laugh of 
childhood is distasteful to a man, — especially if 
he hates it, or hates to hear it, — believe Lavater, 
and have nothing to do with him. Depend 
upon it, he is either thoroughly without a soul, 
or he has so soiled and blackened it by sin, 
that the sound issuing from young and inno- 
cent lips pierces to his heart like the constrained 
remembrance of a forfeited inheritance. You 
may be sure he has got about him no common 
guilt. To him, in a worse sense than the poet 
meant it, the beautiful but melancholy verse 
applies : — 

" I remember — I remember 

The poplars straight and high j 
I used to think their spiry tops 
Were close against the sky. 

u It was a childish ignorance, 
But now 't is little joy 
To know I 'm further off from heaven 
Than when I was a loyP 

Sir Fowell Buxton delighted in children, 
and they, with their instinctive perception of 
those that like them, delighted in him. He 
used to walk with them, and talk to them, and 
try to turn their attention to God in his works. 
He was fond of pointing out the skill that was 
displayed in the packing of a bud, and of 
drawing other interesting lessons from flowers. 
On this account, his little nephews and nieces, 



80 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

(bless their young hearts !) when they saw the 

snowdrops and violets in the early spring, used 

to welcome them as u Uncle Buxton's Se?*mons." 

I hardly dare approach, and yet I must touch 

— I will try to do so with a very gentle hand — 
other forms of our friend's affections. That of 
the deepest and tenderest is delicately veiled, 
and properly so, for, 

" Not easily forgiven 
Are those, who, setting wide the doors that bar 
The secret bridal chambers of the heart, 
Let in the day." 

Yet enough is seen, and to that we may allude 
without impropriety, to show Sir Fowell Bux- 
ton's buoyant delight — his irrepressible joy — 
at the thought of that which constituted his 
richest and most endeared possession ; the source 
of influences the most powerful in personal 
character and public achievement. How pro- 
found his respect ! — how vast his appreciation ! 

— how tender and playful some of his utter- 
ances ! — what a depth of meaning in some 
apparently jocund words ! But we pass on. 
His paternal character would seem to have 
been beautiful. Only think of the leader of a 
section of the House of Commons, — the man 
bending under the weight of public business, 
absorbed by interests the most momentous, and 
fighting with difficulties that demanded, and 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 81 

had, nights and days of anxiety and lahor, — 
think of him coming along the Strand from 
some parliamentary committee, stepping into a 
shop to purchase a picture, hiding it when he 
got home among the torn-up letters and envel- 
opes in his basket, that when his little children 
should rummage amongst them, or turn them 
out, he might hear their exultation at discover- 
ing the treasure, and join in a joy that would 
ring like the news of a nursery California ! 
He was lying, one day, very fatigued and tired, 
on a sofa ; one of his sons was lying on an- 
other : their eyes were alike just open, though 
each supposed the other to be asleep. Presently, 
the great, giant-like man — the man that swayed 
the senate, was looked up to by thousands as a 
leader, and who seemed born for authority and 
command — slowly and quietly rose up from 
his position — trod softly and stealthily across 
the room — placed a chair — lifted the feet of 
the young sleeper, as they seemed to be hang- 
ing uneasily from the sofa — laid them gently 
on the chair, and then crept back again as care- 
fully as he had gone, and lay down to his own 
repose ! All had been seen, though he thought 
not so. It would never have been mentioned — 
it might not have been remembered by him — 
had it only been a thing known to the father. 
It was the irresistible impulse, the gushing out 
of irrepressible affection. I dare say he turned 



82 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

away from the lad with a glow at his heart and 
a prayer upon his tongue : a prayer whose 
answer he had already, though unconsciously, 
secured ; for the impression of that act on the 
heart of the son must have given such sacred- 
ness to the wishes of the father, as could not 
fail, I should think, to have done more for the 
youth's virtue than any mere preceptive teach- 
ing could have secured. 

The same traits appear in his letters about his 
children, and in his correspondence with them. 
He is always anxious, indeed, about their pos- 
sessing a strong, decided character; but he 
betrays constantly not only the strength but the 
tenderness of his own. Little things indicate 
character more than great ones. How much 
there is in his promising the boys half-a-crown 
for the repetition of some poetry, and then, if 
visiters — grown-up people — happened to be 
present, asking them to rehearse something, and 
handing to each of them a half-crown too ! Or 
in his playful letters to his little children ; — his 
asking after the dogs and ducks, — and his 
description of a pony that liked porter, with 
the sly addition, "he 'prefers ours I" Why, 
there 's poetry in all this. Buxton, indeed, did 
not write poetry ; but, what was far better, he 
acted it, lived it, by his practical combination 
of the beautiful with the true. I wish I could 
tell you all about the friendship which seems to 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 83 

have subsisted between him and his eldest 
daughter. She was rather older than his other 
children, in consequence of the deaths of those 
that came between them, and hence she sprang 
up into his companion and friend. She acted 
as his secretary ; read with him, wrote for 
him ; entered into his objects with hereditary 
enthusiasm ; discussed with him the merits of 
men and measures : went with him, at times, 
to the House ; and looked down upon him from 
the ventilator like a guardian angel. On the 
first of August, 1834, — the day of Negro Eman- 
cipation, — Priscilla Buxton, herself emanci- 
pated from a filial service which she had ever 
felt to be " perfect freedom," — was married at 
Northrepps to one of her father's parliamentary 
and personal friends. The feelings of that 
father, you may naturally suppose, were raised 
that day to the highest pitch, and deepened into 
profoundest intensity, by the mixture of emo- 
tions of which he was the subject. He could 
not but think of those swarthy thousands, far 
off in other lands, whom he had come almost 
to regard as his children, who, that day, were 
to awake and find themselves free men ; — and 
then, there was the endeared daughter at his 
side, who had stood there for so many years, 
whom, with his own hand, he was to give up, 
to be bound for life, — but bound by fetters 
welcomed by them both ! At four o'clock he 



84 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

writes to a friend — " The bride is just gone; — 
everything has passed off to admiration/AND — 
there is not a slave in the British colonies ! " 
What a glorious mingling of two classes of 
emotion, each sufficient of itself to fill the soul ! 
How different from the noble lady, at the time 
of the Reform agitation, whose daughter was 
dying, and who exclaimed to a friend — " Real- 
ly, my dear, what with the danger of my poor 
child and my fears about the Bill, I am posi- 
tively quite distracted ! " Some time after the 1st 
of August, Buxton wrote to another friend — " I 
surrendered my vocation, and, next to Macau- 
lay, my best human helper in it, on the same 
day." How his soul must have shown itself — 
what drops must have accompanied the parting 
paternal benediction — on that memorable day ! 

" Some feelings are to mortals given 
With less of earth in them than heaven. 
And if there be a human tear 
From passion's dross refined and clear, — 
A tear so limpid and so meek 
It would not stain an angel's cheek, — 
'Tis that which pious fathers shed 
Upon a duteous daughter's head." 

But the two circumstances which, to my mind, 
most forcibly show the deep feeling which was 
united with strength in Sir Fowell Buxton, are 
the following : — He found exquisite enjoyment 
in the quiet of the country ; it was delicious to 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 85 

him after the agitations of a session. With his 
well-used pocket Bible in his hand, he used to 
walk out, like Isaac, meditating in the fields at 
eventide ; — and he did this, that he might 
enjoy, as he said, quietly and alone, what he 
called the " Divine silence " of the scene ! Car- 
lyle says that the Germans have a proverb to 
this effect — "Speech is silvern — silence is 
golden." Buxton was capable of understand- 
ing this. That "Divine silence" descended 
softly on his soul, like the dew on the flowers ; 
and I believe, for my part, that dew, falling 
upon flowers, never fell on anything more soft 
than what that silence fell upon in him. The 
other incident was, that when a number of let- 
ters were brought in to him, one morning in the 
month of September, 1834, which he knew by 
the colonial post-marks would contain tidings 
respecting the events of the first of August, he 
took them up, sealed as they were, and walked 
out into the woods alone, — his large heart 
beating with mingled apprehension and hope. 
There, with no eye to witness his emotion, he 
opened his letters with silent awe, and his lips 
to God in vocal praise. His feelings were far 
too intense and sacred to be permitted in their 
expressions to have auditors or observers. 

Such was Sir Fowell Buxton, as his character 
and course unfold themselves to me in the de- 
tails and intimations of the volume before us. 
S 



86 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

In expressing my opinions, I am not conscious 
of having said anything but what is borne out 
by positive facts. All that I have uttered has 
been a running commentary — not on eulogies 
written about him — but on things that he did, 
— which are substantially himself — the em- 
bodiment to us of what he was. I knew him 
only as a public man. I had no personal 
acquaintance with him whatever. I once wrote 
to him to present a petition to parliament; and 
I once spoke at a small meeting in the lower 
room in this hall, when he was in the chair ; 
and I remember amusing him by quoting from 
"Froude's Remains," which had just been 
published, a passage, which I handed him the 
volume to look at* To me, this book is Bux- 
ton. It may be in your hands as well as mine; 
you can judge of the man as well as I ; take 
and test whatever I have said, or have yet to 
say ; — I am quite easy as to the result. There 
he stands, — a fine specimen of true manhood. 
With no pretensions to genius; no brilliant 
parts: no creative imagination; no gusts or 
flashes of inspired eloquence ; nothing to trust 
to, that, without study, effort, or preparation, 
might surprise himself and take others by storm. 
He is simply a person of strong natural good 

* " I cannot get over my prejudice against the niggers ; every one 
I meet seems to me like an incarnation of the whole Anti-Slavery 
Society, and Fowell Buxton at their head." 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. O/ 

sense; of sound and vigorous understanding; 
of firm purpose; laborious diligence ; high cul- 
ture ; — of great aims in life ; of singular excel- 
lence of character ; with clear head, large heart, 
pure habits, simple tastes ; — combining, as we 
have seen, tenderness with power; winning 
love, as well as commanding respect. He was 
humane, munificent, kind to his humble neigh- 
bors, considerate, approachable. So far he 
might be "known and read of all men;" — an 
honest, upright, virtuous man ; — true to his 
trust, true to himself; honoring and using his 
right-hand ; having faith in w^ork, hard work ; 
believing in that as the grand source and secret 
of success; but, while wielding it well and 
right nobly, and as if he had time for nothing 
else, cultivating all that was beautiful and 
attractive, or displaying it as if by an inherent 
law. These things, I repeat, might have been 
seen by the ordinary observers of his worldly 
life. But we are now to see "greater things 
than these." We are to be permitted to look 
at the "inward man ;" — to examine the Divine 
and supernatural source of what he was; — 
that which underlay all that was visible, — 
that was deeper than instinct, and higher than 
nature, — that gave strength to strength, and 
beauty to beauty ; — and that infused into his 
motives, affections, and acts, that element which 
makes virtue holiness, and man God-like. 



»y A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

III. 

Having traced the natural history, so to 
speak, of Sir Fowell Buxton as a man ; — de- 
scribed the original capabilities of the substance 
of which he was made, and seen the progress of 
the cutting, moulding, and polishing, — so far 
as external influences and human agencies were 
concerned, and the action of those portions of 
his nature which lay nearest to the surface of 
the outward life, — till he appeared before us a 
somewhat finished and well-proportioned speci- 
men of humanity, — useful in his public course, 
and attractive in his private character ; — we 
are now to advance to the examination of the 
depth and working of that spiritual element, 
which, as we have hinted, makes the grand 
difference between a merely virtuous and a truly 
religious man ; — between goodness as the off- 
spring- of natural disposition or social culture, 
and goodness as including a holy principle, and 
being essentially a Divine result. I might have 
included this in the last division of the lecture, 
as one of the things that made Sir Fowell Bux- 
ton what he was ; but I look upon it as of such 
great importance in itself, and I regard him as 
so preeminently illustrating its influence, — so 
conspicuously showing how it may be the 
"chief corner-stone" in the basis of character, 
and may give the last touch and finish to its 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 89 

adornments f and how possible it is, for those 
who will, to be "diligent in business," and yet, 
" filled with the Spirit," — "men of the world," 
and yet "temples of God; " — that I choose to 
separate it entirely from other things, and to 
devote this division of the lecture to it. 

It is a great distinction with me — the distinc- 
tion betvieen virtue and holiness ; — one which 
I think you, young men, will do well to under- 
stand. I can give men full credit for a great 
deal that is noble and beautiful, and yet con- 
sistently charge them with a great crime, and 
speak of them as placed in a most perilous po- 
sition. It is not at all necessary, in order to 
show the importance of the Gospel, or the unfit- 
ness of men for the future enjoyment of heav- 
enly bliss, to make out that they are literally 
" desperately wicked," — vicious, depraved, 
abominable, — and " to every good work repro- 
bate." By no means. I admit the excellence, 
and I admire the virtues, of many a natural or 
unconverted man. Such an individual may be 
pure, truthful, upright, benevolent, beneficent 
— a model, indeed, for many of far higher pre- 
tensions. But the point is, that a man may be 
all this without thinking of God — without 
even believing in him ; — his excellence, how- 
ever great, may be altogether "of the earth, 
earthy; " it may spring from sources which lie 
within the limits of mere social morality, and 



90 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

it may be confined therefore to the rewards 
which flow from it in the world to which it 
belongs. There is nothing severe or unchari- 
table in saying, that something far more than 
this is needed to the perfection of a being who 
possesses essentially a religious nature ; — who 
sustains relations to a personal God ; — who is 
born under an obligation to all divine virtues as 
well as secular, — and who, as a spirit, has to 
come one day into direct contact with the 
Infinite Spirit, and to a condition of existence 
exclusively spiritual. 

Without the possession of religious faith — 
without the exercise of love to and delight in 
God — character is imperfect; without an in- 
ward harmony of thought and will, affection 
and preference, between man's soul and the 
Divine source of it, there can be no cordial 
correspondence between them, and no fitness for 
their dwelling together. The virtuous man is 
not excluded from heaven because of his vir- 
tues ; he is incapable of heaven by an inherent 
defect. In spite of all that is in him and about 
him, of the just and good, the pure and the 
beautiful, it is possible for him to be destitute 
of devotion, — disloyal as regards the supreme 
government and the Divine law — and utterly 
"without God in the world." With the glow 
and blush of his many virtues upon him, and 
while justly the object of social respect, or the 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 91 

idol of popular admiration, — he may be guilty 
of the most serious crime, by trampling upon 
all spiritual obligations ; — and he may be 
placed — by no capricious or arbitrary act, but 
just by the operation of the essential laws of 
his spiritual being — in a position pregnant with 
alarm and peril. Two men may stand before 
us very much alike in all that appears to the 
eye of the observer ; — they may do precisely 
the same things, as to their outward form, and 
have the same aspect of social goodness; — and 
yet the one shall act from the impulses of a life 
which has no existence in the other at all. The 
one shall do everything " unto God 1 '' — the 
other man may never think of Him as obliga- 
tion or end. The one shall maintain intercourse 
with Christ, as the object of love and the source 
of assistance — the other may be either ignorant 
or infidel, — careless concerning, or rejecting, 
his redemption. Both may appear equally use- 
ful and attractive to the world, in the aspect 
presented to it of their world-life ; and, so far 
as the world is concerned, both are beautiful, 
and both good ; — but, in consequence of the 
essential difference between them, — the pres- 
ence in the one, and the absence in the other, 
of a religious, spiritual, divine life, — the excel- 
lence of the first comes to be holiness — that of 
the second remains virtue. The one, as a spirit, 
out of the body, would find himself in harmony 



92 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

with the persons and the duties, the avocations 
and pleasures, of a perfectly holy and divine 
world ; — the other, in the midst of it, would be 
surrounded by all that was uncongenial and 
foreign, distasteful and repulsive. He could no 
more live in it than a man in water, though 
that water were " clear as crystal;" or "the 
fish of the sea" on " the dry land," though that 
land were Paradise itself — bright with the ver- 
dure of the virgin earth, smiled upon by the 
sky of an infant world. 

Virtue is very important for earth, and very 
beautiful, even by itself; — but it is neither the 
attainment of the divine in man, nor the com- 
plete preparation for his ultimate destiny. It is 
not the realization of God's original idea of 
him, nor of what he was intended to be as 
redeemed. Then again, the means and agencies 
by which humanity, considered as sinful and 
needing to be saved, — as requiring to be 
renewed, regenerated and sanctified, — is to be 
delivered from guilt and "born to God;" — 

°se, properly understood, constitute the pecu- 
liarities of the evangelical dispensation, and 
giv r e to the Gospel its appropriate attributes. In 
proportion as they are justly apprehended and 
felt, — "believed in by the heart," "confessed 
by the mouth," experienced in their power, and 
lived upon and relished as the "daily manna" 
of the inward life, — man comes to be Christian 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 93 

man ; the spirit within him is in its right state, 
— is united to God by the faith of Christ, — 
brought into a condition of harmony with the 
one, through the redeeming work of the other. 
He now lives in the flesh, or in this mortal and 
materialized state, in such a sense, that -'Christ 
lives in him;" — he has that "shed abroad," 
or "formed," in "his heart," which prompts 
him to discharge the duties of earth from mo- 
tives drawn from the upper world; — ever to 
act "as seeing Him that is invisible;" — and, 
while "denying ungodliness and worldly lusts," 
and living "soberly and righteously" among 
men. "following after" and "thinking" much 
of all that is "lovely and of good report," 
because in these things there is "virtue," and 
from them "praise;" — yet, all the time, he is 
primarily moved by the great thoughts which 
belong to the future, the infinite and eternal, — 
which cluster about the anticipated advent, and 
teach him to prepare for the day of the Lord — 
waiting for " the glorious appearing of the 
great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ" 

Now, I wish you to understand that Sir 
Fowell Buxton was, in the sense of these state- 
ments, — so far as the principle pervading them 
is concerned, — a religious man. He was an 
earnest, evangelical Christian; and one of the 
great uses of the book before us, as it seems to 
me, is, to show the possibility of a man's com- 



94 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

bining a very laborious outward life — a life of 
business, trade, politics — with one of deep and 
eminent spirituality. Men busily occupied in 
the affairs of the world, behind the counter or 
the desk, "in chambers" or at "the house," 
often imagine, or perhaps complain, that they 
have no time to attend to spiritual subjects, or 
for the discharge of religions acts. If reminded 
of David as a soldier writing his psalms, or 
Daniel at court directing a kingdom, and yet 
keeping daily his hours of prayer, they can dis- 
cover reasons, in their peculiar aids as inspired 
men, to render their example inapplicable to 
them. Here, however, is a man of our day, — 
and one ever active, and all alive, in his worldly 
duties: — not said to have been attentive to 
devout communings with his own spirit, and to 
earnest and holy walking with God, — but 
proved to have been so, by papers bearing the 
stamp of sincerity, and indicating at once the 
reality of his religion, and the constancy of his 
efforts to preserve it by culture, and to evince it 
by consistency. 

In sketching the outline of Sir Fowell Bux- 
ton's religions life, and in trying to give you a 
clear and distinct idea respecting it, I think it 
will be well to put it before you in separate 
parts. Each will be best seen by itself — the 
combination of all will complete the picture. 
Let us notice, then — first, the rise and progress 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 95 

of religion within him, till it acquired fixedness 
and supremacy : second, the means by which it 
was preserved and nourished, strengthened and 
increased : third, the modes of its manifesta- 
tion ; — how it found its direct utterance, or in- 
cidentally displayed its presence, power, purity, 
or depth: fourth, and lastly, let us inquire 
whether there was anything about him, and 
what, out of harmony, or supposed to be out of 
harmony, with his professions when living; or, 
still more, with the tone and tenor of these pri- 
vate papers published since his decease. I shall 
not make any extended application to you, after 
doing all this. I want you to see the lessons in 
the picture itself as it proceeds, — and to watch 
for them as they come ; — for, if I can paint it 
faithfully, come they will, — with every new 
color, every stroke of the pencil, every change 
of position, and every ray of light. 

I. In looking at Sir Fowell Buxton's religious 
history, I think you should by no means leave 
out of view the possibility of very early impres- 
sions and impulses that may not have been 
without their secret effect. I do not know how 
far the Friends, in consistency with their pecu- 
liar principles of speaking and praying only 
when moved by the Divine Spirit, discourage 
or draw the minds of children in respect to 
positive religious acts; nor how far Buxton's 
mother might conduct the religious training of 



96 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

her son on the Quaker model. I have no doubt 
that methods were employed both to imbue his 
mind with the seeds of holy thought, as they 
are contained in the " Scriptures of Truth/' and 
to draw forth the religious faculty itself, through 
means of varied and appropriate influences. As 
I believe, also, that the redemption of Christ 
was the redemption of humanity ; — that in 
consequence of it we are born under mercy, 
and "beloved of God;" — that we are placed 
by grace in instant contact with spiritual influ- 
ences to which we ought to attribute whatever 
constitutes a conscious good, that struggles with 
the lusts of our worser nature ; — so, I doubt 
not that, in the early childhood and youth of 
our friend, God touched him often in paternal 
tenderness, — sought to draw and attach him 
to Himself, — that his infant spirit might love 
holiness, and his young heart hate sin. Who 
shall say that this is always without effect? It 
is thus that He, whose will it is " that not 
any of his little ones should perish," aids the 
opening of the conscience and the reason, — 
concurs with the training and teaching of pa- 
rents, — and through means of truth presented 
from without, and by intuitional perceptions of 
the right within, is Himself " the Light, which 
lighteth every man that cometh into the world." 
You should be stimulated and encouraged by 
every spiritual desire you feel ; every movement 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 97 

of the will against evil ; everything like a hunger 
of the heart after good. These things cannot 
be from nothing, for that is impotent ; — they 
cannot be from yourselves, " ye being evil," for 
that would be absurd ; — they cannot be from 
beneath, for that is impossible ; — they can 
come from nowhere but from God above ; and 
they ought to be precious to you as proofs of 
his gracious presence in your souls, and tokens 
of his paternal interference in your favor. Some- 
how or other, many young persons have got a 
fearful and paralyzing impression upon them 
that God is, from the first , their natural enemy; 
they have no animating conceptions of his 
Fatherhood — no confidence that his wishes 
are actually on their side. Everything within 
you, that has anything about it inclining you to 
the right, falsifies the persuasion. That is God, 
" speaking to you as to children ; " — his grace 
seeking to draw you to Himself. Yery early 
that voice may be heard, and the ear and the 
soul inclined towards it; though the period 
may be long before the life of the spirit, freed 
from the clouds and fogs of the flesh, rises in 
strength and clearness in the character, and 
manifests its reality by indubitable proofs. I 
have no doubt, that many an instance of ap- 
parent sudden and visible conversion is the 
maturity only of a process which has long been 
advancing within. As a youth, Bnxton was 
9 



98 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

distinguished for truthfulness. When an usher, 
at Greenwich, charged him with some fault, 
which he denied, Dr. Burney instantly said, "I 
hav.e never known the boy tell a falsehood, and 
I will not disbelieve him now." Several little 
things indicate a superiority to what was de- 
basing. I do not think he was ever corrupted 
by any of those low and vicious habits that are 
sometimes contracted early in life. Nor do I 
doubt that this was in part owing, not only to 
a sense of honor and propriety, but to feelings 
having something in them of religiousness, — 
conferred, perhaps, in answer to a mother's 
prayers, — guarded and nourished by occa- 
sional earnest supplications of his own. Happy 
is the youth who has not to look back on a 
time like this with the painful consciousness, 
that the early dew of the heart has been ex- 
haled by the heats of passion, or brushed off by 
contact with the world, — that " he has cast off 
fear, and restrained prayer before God! ,} 

In 1806, however, when Buxton was twenty 
years of age, Providence began more conspic- 
uously to quicken and develop his spiritual na- 
ture. He was travelling in Scotland with his 
Earlham friends ; and, in the course of the jour- 
ney, he purchased a Bible, with the express 
determination to read a portion of it every day. 
He commenced and continued the exercise. It 
became one of the fixed habits of his life. Its 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 99 

immediate effect upon him is thus stated: — . 
'-■ Formerly I read generally rather as a duty 
than a pleasure, but now I read the Scriptures 
with great interest, and, I must say, happiness." 
Again, "I am sure that some of the happiest 
hours that I spend are while I am reading our 
Bible, which is as great a favorite as a book 
can be. I never before felt so assured that the 
only means of being happy is from seeking the 
assistance of a superior Being, or so inclined to 
endeavor to submit myself to the direction of 
principle." Now, it is to be admitted that the 
phraseology of these extracts is vague and gen- 
eral, and indicates no distinct perception of 
evangelical doctrine, or any spiritual apprecia- 
tion of the Gospel, properly so called. But he 
has got into the right track. He is a daily and 
serious reader of the Word ; he is sitting at the 
feet of the Divine Teacher; he is "following 
on to know the Lord." A young man who is 
thus occupied may reasonably be expected to 
become constantly wiser and better ; — to have 
light increased and truth revealed, till his mind, 
opened and expanded by their influence, shall 
apprehend and approve " the things that are 
excellent;" and, " being taught of God," shall 
arrive at the full " acknowledgment of the mys- 
tery of God, and of the Father, and of Christ." 
The next event in the order of means, and 
of gracious providential arrangement, was in 



100 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

1811, when he was recommended by two cleri- 
cal friends to attend the ministry of the Rev. 
Josiah Pratt. Mr. Pratt was a pious evangelical 
clergyman of the school of the Newtons, Sim- 
eons, and Cecils, of former days. Under his 
teaching, Sir Fowell Buxton's mind speedily 
opened to the intelligent reception of the truth. 
He obtained far more clear, deep, and enlarged 
conceptions of it than he had previously re- 
ceived. The insufficiency of our own right- 
eousness ; the importance of faith in the atoning 
sacrifice, and of the influences of the sanctifying 
Spirit ; the need of being " saved ; " and the way 
to be saved — as held and taught by the best ex- 
pounders of the apostolic testimony, with every 
other relative truth — were exhibited and en- 
forced, I imagine, with such power, richness, 
and fervor, as, by God's blessing, materially to 
affect the mind and heart of our Christian in- 
quirer, — to give fulness to his knowledge and 
impulse to his piety. Mark the advantage of 
" hearing the word," as well as of reading it; 
— the importance to be attached to a spiritual 
instructor and an evangelical ministry : — the 
advantage, it may be added, of young men 
having such associates as may lead or direct 
them to suitable teachers ; — and the blessed 
results that may follow from a word of advice 
and counsel. The gratitude of the pupil, in the 
case before us, led him almost to overrate his 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 101 

obligations to the instructor. Sir Fowell Bux- 
ton went so far as to say, in a letter to Mr. 
Pratt, that, "whatever he had done in his life 
for Africa, the seeds of it were sown in his 
heart at Wheeler Chapel." This statement, if 
it means " Africans," and includes the slaves 
in the West Indies, I regard as one of those 
instances of exaggeration to which the mind 
is prone in speaking of those who have first 
strongly affected it. The seeds of his doings 
had been sown before, by other circumstances 
and other hands; though they were watered, 
doubtless, by Mr. Pratt, and sprang up under 
his ministry. If the statement was limited to 
Africa, and referred to his interest in missions, 
and his anxieties respecting the spiritual benefit, 
as well as the temporal freedom and elevation, 
of its inhabitants, it may be more correct. But, 
in either case, it teaches a lesson worthy of 
remembrance. 

The last and perfecting event, — that which 
gave fixedness and maturity to Sir Fowell 
Buxton's religion, — which brought it out as 
life in the experience, as well as light and 
knowledge in the intellect, — was an alarming 
illness with which he was visited in 1813. I 
do not mean that he had not, subjectively, ex- 
perienced something of religion before, or that 
the spiritual life now only began. The process 
had been gradually advancing for years. The 
9* 



102 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

light had early and long been " as the morning 
spread upon the mountains," and had struggled 
and increased against mist and darkness. Life 
had been stirring and augmenting within him, 
like the growth and ripening of the infant in the 
womb ; it was now to be developed in a higher 
form, and to become a thing both of distincter 
consciousness and of richer manifestation. The 
account given of this event is deeply interesting, 
and the frequent references to it by the father 
justify fully the statement of the son — that the 
period of its occurrence was that "from which 
may be dated that ascendency of religion over 
his mind, which gave shape and coloring to the 
whole of his after life." The points I would 
direct you to observe are, the sight which he 
obtained of the utter insufficiency of his own 
virtue ; — his glad reception of the Christian 
atonement ; — with the happy persuasion and 
high assurance of his interest in it. The effect, 
too, of the whole process, in deepening his sense 
of personal sinfulness, and filling him with 
shame as well as joy, is very significant. It is 
thus, often, that men are never half aware of 
the magnitude of their guilt till it is removed ; 
they only learn the extent of their criminality 
by the extent of their obligations to the grace 
that saves them. It is well that it is so. " Who 
knoweth the power of thine anger 1 " Alas ! if 
known, "the spirit would fail before it," and 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 103 

the souls which God has made. " After that I 
was turned, I repented; and after that I was 
instructed, I smote upon my thigh." 

When Sir Fowell Buxton first felt himself 
unwell, he actually " prayed that he might 
have a dangerous illness, provided that illness 
might bring him nearer to God." Such a prayer 
partakes, perhaps, of infirmity, though God 
may overlook that in his condescension to our 
weakness. We ought " to draw nigh to God " 
without being forced to it, and without waiting 
to be driven. The mercies of God should lead 
us to repentance. The prayer, however, was 
heard in both its parts — its petition and its 
proviso. He had the illness, imminently dan- 
gerous, — and he was drawn nigher to God ; — 
drawn, indeed, so nigh, so lovingly, that he 
never wished to leave his side, and never wan- 
dered more ! When the disorder assumed an 
alarming appearance, he spent nearly an hour 
in most fervent prayer. He had been perplexed 
with doubts — his prayer was, to have them 
removed. The next day he found them not 
only entirely removed, but replaced by a cer- 
tain degree of conviction totally different from 
anything he had before experienced. " It would 
be difficult to express," he says, "the satisfac- 
tion and joy which I derived from this altera- 
tion. ' Now know I that my Redeemer liveth,' 
was the sentiment uppermost in my mind, and 



104 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

in the merits of that Redeemer I felt a confi- 
dence that made me look on the prospect of 
death with perfect indifference. No one action 
of my life presented itself with any sort of con- 
solation. I knew that by myself I stood justly 
condemned ; but I felt released from the penal- 
ties of sin by the blood of our sacrifice. In 
Him was all my trust." 

Such was the culmination of Sir Fowell 
Buxton's religious life. It was now, as an 
inward principle, established and fixed ; — as a 
progressive awakening, it had come to "open 
vision ;" — as the struggling progress of the soul 
towards God, it had advanced " even to his 
seat;" — as an experience, subjectively, of all 
that he had been for years learning to under- 
stand, it was "Christ formed in his heart the 
hope of glory" — oneness, incorporation, vital 
and conscious union with the Lord. From this 
time, " the life that he lived in the flesh, he lived 
by the faith of the Son of God, who loved him 
and gave himself for him : " and " Christ lived 
in him." Depend upon it, young men, there is 
rationality and philosophy in all this. Thus 
was illustrated and embodied, in an individual, 
all that we advanced in the introductory re- 
marks to this section. " He became a partaker 
of a Divine nature." He had that within him, 
which so affected all he did from henceforth — 
affected it, consciously and by purpose — that 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 105 

the same act was a different thing in him from 
what it could be in one who had it not. His 
virtue became holiness. The man, Godly. 
May every one of you be so ■- transformed by 
the renewing of your minds," that you, too, 
may know, by experience, what it is God's 
blessed, holy, and perfect will that you should 
be and do : — that which you will find to be 
your " reasonable " or rational " service ! " 

2. With respect to the modes by which, in 
Sir Fowell Buxton, the religious life was nour- 
ished and sustained, you will do well to notice 
the following things : — 

He was a constant and devout reader of the 
Scriptures. His Bible appears ever to have 
been to him as the countenance of a loving 
and beloved friend. He speaks of its perusal 
as a thing delightful and interesting in the high- 
est degree, considered simply as an exercise of 
the mind ; — somewhat resultless, indeed, if 
unattended with prayer, but, with that, becom- 
ing to him invariably the source of light and 
influence which purified his reason and stimu- 
lated his activity. His Bible, in the marks of 
his pen or pencil, bore manifest proofs of his 
diligent use of it. There are two ways in 
which you, young men, may read the Scriptures. 
You may read them devotionally ; — that is, 
with a view simply to the serious impression 
of the truth on the soul, and the preservation 



106 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

of a harmony between the book and it. This 
is to be done by a daily portion. This does not 
need to be long — nor does the engagement 
require long time, nor so much the exercise of 
the intellect on the trains of Divine thought, as 
the attention of the heart to the results of its 
argument, or the opening of it to the reception 
of the details and utterances, — often brief and 
broken, but always suggestive — of the inward" 
experience of its holy men. Then there is the 
more intellectual reading of the Scriptures. You 
may often spend hours at a time in the reading 
of the Bible, in the same way as you would 
read another book. Go through, at one sitting, 
one or two of the Old Testament historical 
tracts, or a gospel, or an epistle ; read with a 
map before you, and trace or find out, as you 
proceed, the course of a journey ; or where a 
battle was fought, or a miracle done ; or a king 
crowned, or an individual born or buried, or 
favored with a Divine vision ; and so forth. 
Compare the accounts of two or more Gospels ; 
compare the Acts and the Epistles, and make 
out the particulars of the missionary travels 
and voyages of St. Paul — the times when his 
letters were written — the places where they 
were penned — the sort of people to whom they 
were severally addressed — as to their previous 
state, habits, religion, refinement. Use, or refer 
to, a Paragraph Bible. Get one or two works 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 107 

that will throw some light on the customs and 
antiquities of the Jews, the Hebrew poetry, and 
kindred subjects. Take an epistle, — analyze 
it, divide it for yourselves into distinct parts, 
according to what appears to you the division 
of its subjects, or the order, advance, and 
breaks in the argument ; mark what it estab- 
lishes in the way of doctrinal truth, illustrates 
as experience, or inculcates as consistent prac- 
tical duty. Make out a list of the miracles or 
the parables of Jesus : collect, from his letters, 
the prayers of Paul ; find out the prophecies 
referred to in the New Testament, or the quo- 
tations contained in it from the Old. These — 
and various other ways of employing a whole 
evening, now and then, in the study of the 
Bible — you will find to be exercises as inter- 
esting as they are useful ; as easy, too, in a lit- 
tle time, as they are instructive ; and as bene- 
ficial to faith, feeling, and piety, as they are 
invigorating to the understanding. In both 
these ways, there are indications, in the " Life," 
that Sir Fowell Buxton read the Bible. His 
reading was habitual, earnest, prayerful. He 
found time for it as a duty — delighted in it as 
a joy — and lived by it as food, refreshment, 
and rest. 

Another thing was, not only his attendance 
on the means of grace, in the form of public 
worship and ministerial teaching, but his man- 



108 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

ner of attendance. At one time he was much 
in the habit of attending at the Friends' Meet- 
ing House ; and, I suspect, had a liking, to the 
last, to many of the habits and preferences of 
that people. His remarkable power of concen- 
trating his attention, and precipitating, so to 
speak, his whole mind, and keeping it fixed, 
upon any subject, enabled him to derive benefit 
from, and to feel edified by, repeated occasions 
of " silent waiting." But, it is to be remem- 
bered, that he used to read, carefully and 
devoutly beforehand, some portion of Scripture : 
having got that into his head, it was ready to 
be laid upon the heart, and to be personally 
applied by inward reflection, if no instruction 
came to him from without ; and oft, I doubt 
not, those hours which he spent in "stillness" 
and " quietness " in the Quakers' Meeting 
House were to him like the "Divine silence" 
of the country. He conversed with God and 
with himself. " While he mused the fire 
burned ; " and if he did not, like the psalmist, 
immediately " speak with his tongue," he was 
made more fit both for speaking and acting as 
a good man, when he should return to the 
duties of daily life. In the same spirit of seri- 
ous forethought, intelligent and devout prepara- 
tion, I conceive of him as attending Mr. Pratt's 
ministry, and habitually the worship and com- 
munion of the church. There is a great deal 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 109 

in being in harmony with what you have to 
do, or what you go anywhere to listen to or 
enjoy. You learn more from a discourse on 
any subject with which you have already some 
acquaintance ; — and you experience satisfac- 
tion and delight, and receive and retain impres- 
sions of pleasure, in proportion as you have an 
inward sympathy with anything you read, see, 
or hear. This law of your nature is applicable 
to religion and religious engagements. You 
can do much to promote in yourselves, and to 
seek from God, that "preparation of heart" for 
your public sabbath- worship, which being pos- 
sessed, you will find that neither the day nor 
the duty can be felt as " a weariness." It 
makes every prayer instructive as a sermon ; 
and a true sermon, though ineloquent, subduing 
as devotion and sweet as song. Many a poor 
discourse is rich to them whose hearts are right ; 
and many a good one appears bad from causes 
existing only in the hearer. Blessed are they 
who so seek spiritual preparation for "going 
into the house of God;" and who, having 
"premeditated," so " draw nigh with reverence 
and godly fear," that, instead of " offering the 
sacrifice of fools," they "present their very 
bodies as living sacrifices, holy, and accepta- 
ble," — and find both that " in God's light they 
see light," and that, in thus "waiting upon 
him," while oilier "youths may weary," and 
10 



110 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

other " young men utterly fall," they "rise 
upon wings as eagles, — can run and not be 
weary, and walk and not faint ! " 

Another means of spiritual improvement em- 
ployed by Sir Fowell Buxton was the frequent 
use of the pen in connection with his private 
religious exercises. He often thus conversed 
with himself. He wrote down reviews of the 
past and anticipations of the future. He tried 
to ascertain the condition of his soul. Speak- 
ing in figures, we may say of him — some of 
the figures are borrowed from himself — that 
thus, as a spiritual merchant, he "took stock;'' 
looked into his accounts, went over the doings 
of the year, noticed the items, and balanced the 
amount of profit and loss. As a pilot, he made 
his observations, threw the lead, consulted the 
chart, and calculated his course. As a travel- 
ler, he marked his progress, ascertained his 
position, and took notice of any new scenery 
that opened upon him. As a physician, he 
examined into the state of his "soul's health;" 
acknowledged soundness or detected disease; 
probed wounds or applied stimulants ; required 
exercise or prescribed rest; saw the necessity 
for any change in the habits of the inward 
man ; how he was famished or how fed ; where 
he must abstain, with what he could be re- 
galed ; noting and recording symptoms and cir- 
cumstances, and forming a judgment on the 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. Ill 

whole case. Of these papers, several are con- 
tained in the volume before us. He often thus 
closed one year and began another; and he 
appears always to have distinguished the anni- 
versary of his illness by special exercises of this 
sort. Under date December 25, 1813, — the 
year in which that memorable illness occurred, 
— there is a highly characteristic record of the 
manner in which he kept that Christmas day.* 
And there is another paper,! dated January 1, 
1830, extremely interesting, from the number of 
texts and passages of Scripture which are col- 
lected and arranged and turned into prayers. 
There is a list, too, now and then given, of 
"works laid out" for, or to be commenced in the 
course of, an anticipated year ; always, I think, 
accompanied with the acknowledgment of Him 
in whose strength they were to be attempted, 
with references to the motives whence they 
were to flow, and indications, of the spirit in 
which they would be done. Without mean- 
ing to encourage very frequent spiritual self- 
anatomy, which is in danger of becoming a 
morbid thing, — the act itself symptomatic of 
disease, and terminating often in nothing, or 
worse ; and without recommending you to be 
constantly putting down what you will do — 
writing purposes, prescribing motives, or map- 
ping your course of action ; — I must still say, 

♦Page 47. t Page 242. 



112 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

that an intelligent and thoughtful young man 
will find it useful, both to search into himself 
and to lay out the future, as Sir Fowell Buxton 
may be seen doing. Some people, indeed, 
offend rather than edify by their private dis- 
closures ; — he, never. Others spend life in 
planning how to live; — his plans were brief in 
their visible record when once formed within ; 
and then, being formed, they were not so much 
written of, as fulfilled; — the things were not 
thought about , but done ! 

The last, great, powerful, and principal 
means, by which Sir Fowell Buxton appears 
to have nourished and enriched his piety, was 
prayer. He seems to have been a man of 
earnest and habitual devotion. He cultivated 
the spirit of prayer by thoughtfulness ; by read- 
ing what was adapted to quicken and feed it; 
by writing, at times, his requests before God ; 
and by very frequent vocal utterance. While 
an active, engaged, busy public man, — neces- 
sarily careful for and "cumbered" with many 
things, — he found time, or made it, for prayer. 
He was calmer and brighter for it ; better and 
stronger. He lived and moved in it ; in it he 
found the light of his spiritual being, — through 
it the support of his religious life. He wrote 
prayers in connection with his purposes of 
action; in the prospect of the year; in the antici- 
pation of special events. When he anticipated 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 113 

an improvement in his worldly circumstances, 
he prayed; when he wrote his books, he 
prayed ; when he was collecting materials, and 
preparing his speeches, and fighting the "good 
fight" in the House of Commons, he did all 
with prayer. He prayed in his family, — and 
that, too, with serious preparation and fore- 
thought — that his topics might be selected and 
arranged, his spirit calm, his manner becoming, 
the service comprehensive, serious, instructive. 
For his work, his friends, his family, his chil- 
dren, — for the latter on great and important 
occasions, or at particular crises in their course, 
— prayers would seem to have been often 
offered, and sometimes written. He could not 
get on without prayer. He so habitually con- 
templated his public engagements as " work- 
ing the work of God," as the discharge of a 
service to which he was "called," — which 
was allotted to him from above, — which 
had in itself the Divine approbation, and made 
necessary for him Divine aid, — that he was 
drawn to prayer in it as by a natural law ; 
to him, there was that about his great public 
service that made prayer equally appropriate 
and necessary ; — that drew him to it as by the 
force of a sympathy, and impelled him by con- 
siderations connected with success. Through- 
out life, as a part of his religion itself, in cir- 
cumstances of sorrow and of joy, when "his 
10* 



114 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

heart was lifted up in the ways of the Lord," 
or his spirit broken and crushed by disasters, 
he prayed. The necessity to his soul of the 
hallowed exercise seemed to increase as his 
day declined. He found it to be strength in 
weakness, light in darkness, life in death. 
Through it, "though the outward man per- 
ished, the inward man was renewed day by 
day." Like his Divine Lord, as he drew near 
his last sufferings and was entering into them, 
he again and again prayed. " Being in an 
agony, he prayed more fervently. He some- 
times " rose in the night," and spent consider- 
able time in this exercise ; with earnest utter- 
ance, as he expressed it, "praying hard." Like 
Jacob wrestling with the angel at Peniel, till 
the day broke, and he passed onward, having 
obtained the blessing. 

u Prayer is the Christian's vital breath, 
The Christian's native air ; — 
His watchword at the gates of death ; 
He enters heaven by prayer." 

Sir Fowell Buxton's spirit and habit of prayer 
arose very much from the childlike simplicity 
of his religion; and from his power strongly to 
realize the absent and the distant, and, there- 
fore, the spiritual and invisible, which, as a 
natural attribute of his mind, became faith 
when inspired by piety. After he became fixed 
and happy in his persuasion of the enjoyment 
of the Divine favor through Christ, he never 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 115 

encouraged any perplexing doubts, or suffered 
himself to be seduced into the region of theo- 
logical difficulties. The fact is, he had not 
time for the study of theology as a science, 
though he neither wanted taste nor power for 
recondite speculation. He was religious ; he 
was not a theologian: — his inward life was 
religion in the heart far more than a body of 
divinity in the intellect. The consequence 
was, that he prayed like a child, believed as a 
child, trusted as a child; he asked, expecting 
an answer ; — no more doubting that he would 
have one, than an obedient and beloved boy 
preferring a request to his father's power, or 
his mother's love, for something which he 
knows they are ready to grant. He troubled 
not himself about the objections to prayer aris- 
ing from the perfections and purposes of God, 
or to the possibility of a particular Providence 
and to special Divine interferences in reply to 
supplication, arising from the fixed and general 
laws of the Divine government. He was taught 
to pray by a faith higher than philosophy, and 
impelled to it by an instinct stronger than rea- 
soning. A logic of the heart suffered not the 
logic of the schools to be heard ; or for a mo- 
ment listened to, if it were. His spiritual con- 
victions partook of the nature of intuition. His 
inward eye was opened, and he saw. Where 
others groped and were in doubt, he "handled" 



116 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

and " felt," and was a bright, cheerful child of 
the day. What he had to do, he considered, 
was not to explain to himself, or to allow others 
to question, how God could aid or answer ; but 
to "ask in faith," leaving the rest to Divine 
fidelity and Divine power. Hence, he was 
"careful for nothing, but, in everything, by 
prayer and supplication, he made his requests 
known unto God • and the peace of God, which 
passeth all understanding, kept his heart and 
mind by Jesus Christ." "He was in the con- 
stant habit," says his son, "of communicating 
his cares to his heavenly Father." " Prayer," 
said he himself, " is throwing up the heart to 
God continually. Not always using words, but 
casting up the thoughts to him. Everything 
leads me to prayer, and I always find it an- 
swered, both in little and great things." "I 
often wonder at the slow progress I have made 
of late years in religion, but in this one respect 
I feel a difference: — I see the hand of a direct- 
ing Providence in the events of life, the lesser 
as well as the greater ; and this is of great im- 
portance to me ; for the belief that our actions, 
if attempted aright, are guided and directed by 
superior wisdom, is to me one of the greatest 
inducements to prayer ; and I do think that the 
little trials I have met with have materially 
contributed to produce with me a habit of 
prayer." Sir Fo well's natural qualities of mind 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 117 

and heart, which, disciplined by education and 
directed by principle, led to his power and 
activity in work, were taken up by his religion, 
and, through the grace and spirit of God, which 
we do not forget, and which he never forgot, 
did, spiritually, great and good service to him- 
self. He was a thoroughly earnest man ; had 
the simplicity and directness that characterize 
sound and vigorous minds when absorbed and 
possessed by a ruling passion ; he was capable 
of so realizing the sufferings of others as to look 
upon them, feel them, ache under them, and 
thus to regard no labor as onerous, and no cost 
or self-denial painful, by which they might be 
mitigated. Nature was in all this, as well as 
grace ; original power, as well as superadded 
and supernatural influences. But these quali- 
ties became ancillary to his own progress in 
spiritual things ; to his perception of the Divine 
and his intercourse with God, even as they 
assisted him in his sympathy with humanity 
and his efforts for mankind. This is well put 
by his biographer, in the following suggestive 
and striking statement. " Long before that 
period to which he, at least, referred his first 
real acquaintance with the truths of Christian- 
ity, the peculiar features of his disposition had 
been cast in strong and permanent relief: and 
the religious acts of his mind are deeply stamped 
with the fashion of its native character. It 



118 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

possessed one element which, beyond all others, 
gave shape to the development of his religious 
principles. This was his power of realizing the 
conceptions of his mind and imagination with 
scarcely less force and vividness than that which 
realized external objects. Thus he grasped the 
idea of a future state, not with a mere passive 
belief, but with a strong, effective conviction, as 
a matter of fact of startling plainness, and which 
gave him, to a remarkable degree, a conscious- 
ness of the hollow vanity of all earthly pleas- 
ures and interests." There is added to this, as 
accounting for his habit of prayer, and the 
direct and simple faith with which he prayed, 
the following statement: — " But what chiefly 
marked his religious character, was the absolute 
childlike confidence with which he clung to the 
guiding hand of his heavenly Father, wherever 
his path might lie. There was, in fact, no 
event in his life which he did not attribute to 
his immediate direction." Of this faith, prayer 
was the habitual utterance ; and by this habit- 
ual utterance, faith itself was preserved in exer- 
cise and "increased in might." "It took hold 
of God's strength," and reposed lovingly beneath 
his Fatherhood. That God and Father "saw 
it in secret and rewarded it openly;" — "heard" 
it "in heaven," and honored it on earth! 

Such was our friend as a man of prayer. 
Now, I really believe, if you, young men, will 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 119 

study the facts which make up this portrait, 
and look at the personal embodiment of religion 
in this actual history of a living man, it will do 
far more to defend you' against sceptical and 
metaphysical difficulties about prayer, than any 
reasoning addressed to the understanding ; and 
far more to convince you of the truth and divin- 
ity of our holy faith, than arguments and evi- 
dences of another kind. Let me entreat you to 
pray as an act of faith, — in obedience to Divine 
injunction and promise, — as the appropriate 
expression of the religious instinct against which 
all objections are vain, however unanswerable, 
— instead of thinking that you must first meet 
satisfactorily infidel objections. You might as 
well imagine that, in natural things, an infant 
should abstain from the breast till it under- 
stands the subject of atmospheric pressure, — 
or you yourselves from food till you perfectly 
comprehend the process of nutrition, — or every 
one of us from noble impulses of the heart tilt 
we consult the miserable scruples of the head. 
Spiritually, you may as well imagine that you 
are to understand the Infinite before you will 
worship, — or expect God to give to you an 
" account of bis matters" before you will obey. 
Why, you need the mysterious to worship at 
all. You cannot adore where you fully com- 
prehend. Instead of thinking that " where mys- 
tery begins religion ends," you should rather 



120 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

feel that without mystery there can actually be 
no religion at all. Not only, therefore, do not 
"restrain prayer before God," but "stir up 
yourselves to take hold of him." Depend upon 
it, that is true, in all ages, of devout men, which 
is stated respecting the ancient church, — '•They 
called upon God, and He answered them." Sir 
Fowell Buxton enjoyed, with some of his inti- 
mate friends, — friends equally as Christians 
and politicians, — the solace and strength of 
social prayer. They met at the residence of 
one of them, near "the house," when the debates 
permitted; took tea together; read a portion of 
Scripture, and prayed. They then returned to 
their duties, with no feeling, rely upon it, dimin- 
ished, that was requisite for them, in their 
worldly conflicts, " to quit themselves like 
men." The following fact will appropriately 
conclude this particular: — 

After the conclusion of the American war of 
Independence, the delegates of the States as- 
sembled for the purpose of adjusting the consti- 
tution of the republic. After many days, dur- 
ing which little or no progress was made, and 
in which, elated by their victory, and their then 
novel condition of independence, they forgot 
the acknowledgment which was due to Him 
who had led them to triumph, — in the midst 
of their perplexities, the celebrated Franklin, — 
a man but slightly imbued with the spirit of 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 121 

true Christianity, but who had a profound phi- 
losophical reverence for God, — stood up in 
Congress, and gave utterance to the following 
remarkable language. Referring to the spirit of 
prayer that characterized them during the eight 
years' conflict, and in which they had become 
remiss, he said : — 

" And have we now forgotten the powerful 
Friend ? Or do we imagine that we no longer 
need His assistance? I have lived a long time; 
and the longer I live, the more convincing 
proofs I see of this truth — that God governs 
in the affairs of men ; and, if a sparrow cannot 
fall to the ground without His notice is it prob- 
able that an empire can rise without His aid? 
We have been assured, in the Sacred Writings, 
that, 'Except the Lord build the house, they 
labor in vain that build it.' I firmly believe 
this; and I also believe that, without his con- 
curring aid, we shall succeed in this political 
building no better than the builders of Babel : 
we shall be divided by our little partial local 
interests, — our projects will be confounded, — 
and ourselves shall become a reproach and a 
byword down to future ages; and, what is 
worse, mankind may hereafter, from this unfor- 
tunate instance, despair of establishing govern- 
ment by human wisdom, and leave it to chance, 
war and conquest." 

The historian records, that, from this moment, 
11 



122 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

a spirit of sobriety and judgment fell upon the 
delegates; that forthwith, as if oil had been 
poured upon the waves, their deliberations be- 
came harmonious, and that, within a reasonable 
space, they completed the constitution. 

3. The third particular was, to explain the 
manner in which the religious life demonstrated 
itself in Sir Fowell Buxton. I feel, however, 
it will be necessary to do very little here, as 
much that has been said partakes obviously of 
a two-fold character. Many of those things by 
which his religion was advanced were, at the 
same time, things by which it was shown. 
One or two points may be glanced at for a 
moment. 

To those who knew him best, the religious 
life must have appeared as the spirit and spring 
of the worldly life ; — that which gave vigor to 
its movements, elevation to its aims, sanctity to 
its motives. The whole phenomena that ap- 
peared in the outward man must have been a 
revelation, to those who understood it, of his 
inward being; not merely of natural strength, 
of mental vigor, of moral sympathies — but of 
all, animated and purified by religious faith. 
We can often only look on "the outward 
appearance," and can know nothing more of a 
man. We have no means of judging beyond 
what we see. We may discern in it virtue, — 
but those who can look deeper may see that it 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 123 

springs from a Divine source, and is alive with 
a spirit that makes it holiness. It was thus 
that Sir Fowell Buxton would appear to some. 
When he seemed to the world only to be humane, 
benevolent, patriotic, he might be known to be 
influenced by those feelings which made all 
these things religious. " He that in these things 
serveth Christ, is acceptable to God and approved 
of men." It is possible for these two results to 
be separated. In the thoroughly Christian man 
they are combined. He may be " approved of 
men," because of the act — the outward form ; 
he is " acceptable to God," because of the mo- 
tive — the inward principle: but, in such a case, 
the outward form is the embodiment and cloth- 
ing of the principle. In so far, therefore, as all 
that our friend did had in it any intenseness, 
purity, or force, which it could not have had icith- 
out his religion, so far his worldly life was a con- 
stant utterance and incarnation of the Divine. 

As to more specifically religious acts. There 
is his conduct during the illness of his two 
brothers, and the sentiments to which he gives 
indulgence and expression at their death. There 
is his deportment when visited with domestic 
calamity, — the successive removal, in a very 
short period, of four children. There is the hue 
of his familiar letters ; — there is the tone of his 
correspondence with his friends ; — there is the 
religious solicitude he expresses towards some 



124 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

— the encouragement administered to others, — 
here there is reproof, there persuasion. Then, 
there was the maintenance of family prayer. 
The service was conducted neither as a form, 
nor with a form ; — though, with the latter, 
there may be as much piety in the duty as 
without it. Still, his mode of conducting it 
showed the strength and maturity of his, for it 
impressed observers with a deep conviction of 
his earnestness and faith. Still further, there 
were his Sunday evening services when in the 
country : his having his hall or parlor thrown 
open to the neighbors, — the villagers being 
invited to attend the worship, — his reading the 
Scriptures, and, by a plain, familiar exposition, 
" causing the people to understand the mean- 
ing." This might not be very regular; — it 
might not be canonical ; — it might not even be 
legal ; — for churchmen in this respect have not 
the same liberty with dissenters ; — but such 
thoughts never troubled Sir Fowell Buxton. 
He believed that any one who understood 
Christianity might teach it to others who knew 
it not; that his capacity and position conferred 
ability, and gave influence, which he might 
exercise and use for God; that, in what he did, 
he was only acting out his principles and his 
professions ; and that if, in doing so, he was out 
of harmony with anything on earth, — with 
political enactments or ecclesiastical law — he 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 125 

was in harmony with a higher system of obli- 
gation and duty than either ; — with the mind 
of God, with the Divine government, and with 
the spirit and order of that "holy church," of 
which all true believers consist, which has its 
members in every denomination, and is thus 
spread " throughout all the world." He was in 
harmony with Him who rebuked his apostles 
for forbidding one to cast out devils who " fol- 
lowed not with them," — who himself preached 
to the poor, though some rudely asked for his 
authority; — and a of whom the whole family 
in heaven and earth is named." These Sunday 
evening services were but another expression 
of that spirit which displayed itself in the sup- 
port and advocacy of Bible and Missionary 
Societies ; which prompted him laboriously to 
master their reports, that he might intelligently 
take part in their anniversaries ; and that led 
him to identify himself with the constitution 
and actings of the "City Mission," as, for many 
years, its treasurer and chairman. In the same 
way, all his kindness, benevolence, philanthro- 
py; his cheerfulness, tenderness and truth: the 
sympathizing heart, the relieving hand ; his 
moral principles and social amenities; the sub- 
stantial materials and the minute adornments 
of the structure of his character; were all 
things by which, and through which, the light 
that was in him shone forth, or in which there 
11* 



126 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

was the Divine element as well as the natural ; 
gracious communications — as well as disposi- 
tion, culture and habit. 

4. The last thing we proposed to advert to 
was, to inquire — and well we may, perhaps, 
after the representations we have gathered and 
given — whether there was anything about Sir 
Fowell Buxton, and what, inconsistent with 
the religious professions he made in his lifetime, 
or with the character of the documents pub- 
lished since his death 1 

Two or three times Sir Fowell Buxton was 
blamed in respect to his public life ; but there 
was nothing in the accusations that would ma- 
terially affect our present inquiry. He was 
blamed for acceding to the compensation and 
apprenticeship clauses of the Slavery Emanci- 
pation Act. I can only say. without going into 
reasons, that I conceive he did what not only 
admitted of defence but of justification. I 
think he was right. He was greatly censured 
for being, as it was thought, behind a more 
advanced section of abolitionists, in not sympa- 
thizing with them, and trying to put an end to 
the apprenticeship before it would legally expire. 
To this, it may be replied, — he was open to 
evidence, though he stood firm, at first, to the 
bargain the nation had made with the colonies; 
that he listened and read — admitted the force 
of the representations made — and aided his 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON. BART. 127 

accusers to achieve success. With respect to 
the Niger Expedition, it is enough to say, it 
was a great misfortune, but not a fault. 

I know not that it is necessary to notice the 
charge against him of unsound churchmanship; 
for even those that made it would hardly, I 
suppose, consider that it went to the root of his 
religion, and made that unsound. There is a 
great lesson, indeed, conveyed to us poor mor- 
tals, both in the fact that Buxton was abused 
for his opinion and vote on the Irish Church 
question, and by the circumstance of one of his 
friends laboring to establish his Church-of- 
Englandism. or to excuse and account for its 
deficiencies. When our friend differed from 
some of his own, on a church question, the cry 
was, "Buxton cuts me to the heart; I never 
read such hollov;, weak, flashy, unsatisfactory 
speeches in my life." " And this." says Bux- 
ton himself, -'but represents the general impres- 
sion among the Evangelicals." It is very sad 
that we cannot differ from one another without 
anger; — or that my brother cannot take a 
position different from mine, without immedi- 
ately losing, in my eyes, all the ability I used to 
admire in him. It is like the case of one of my 
colleagues in this lecture, who was not long ago 
regarded as distinguished both by talents and 
worth ; but who, having acknowledged that he 
sees differently from his friends, and, to be con- 



128 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

sistent, acts on that perception, is now spoken 
of, in many quarters, as if he had neither vir- 
tue nor parts. It is very hard to accord to 
others the liberty we claim ; and exceedingly 
so, if they exercise that liberty in such a way 
as would impose on us disagreeable duties. It 
is the same everywhere, — among all parties, 
and in all men. It is human nature with its 
self-love offended and hurt, and reluctant to the 
task of forgiving, justifying, or refuting the 
offender. As to Sir Fowell Buxton, he was 
something far greater than either good Church- 
man or good Dissenter, — he was a good man, 
— a loving, liberal, large-hearted, thorough 
Christian man, — a noble, simple, true man. 
He loved the Church of England — no question 
about it ; — admired her Liturgy, and enjoyed 
her services, as I do, — and, perhaps, believed 
in the allowableness of her episcopal constitu- 
tion. But he looked at the principles in which 
all the good agree, rather than to the things 
in which churches differ. He was far more 
affected by true work, by whomsoever done, 
than by modes and forms ; in fact, he had a 
good deal of the Quaker in some of his prefer- 
ences, and could not possibly care for or sym- 
pathize with much of "the mint, anise and 
cumin," which is as sacred in the eyes of some 
as the dust of Jerusalem was dear to the Jew. 
He hears a clergyman preach a good sermon. 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 129 

"It would not have disgraced," he says, " Goat 
Lane" — that was the Quaker's Meeting at 
Norwich. " I have heard," he continues, 
"those there, that would not have disgraced a 
cathedral." Some of them, I dare say, from 
his "sweet sister," Priscilla Gurney. After 
giving an account of what he calls " a remark- 
ably comfortable Sunday," spent well in private, 
happily in public, with one of Mr. Pratt's best 
sermons, and a delightful communion service, 
he thus concludes : — "You will hardly believe 
that I had a kind of longing for Norwich Meet- 
ing. In the shape of religious service, a 
Friends' meeting-house, with Joseph and Pris- 
cilla for teachers, is the most congenial to my 
mind; — more so, I think, than anything else." 
"For ornament, for display of wealth, for 
music," he writes from Rome, " for, in short, a 
scene, fifty to one on St. Peter's Cathedral 
against the Friends' meeting-house at Plaistow: 
— for worship in spirit and in truth, fifty to one 
on Plaistow Meeting against St. Peter's and all 
its glories." The liberality for which some 
would apologize, is to me the proof of a genial 
nature, and of good Christianity-skip ; — of a 
sound understanding, a sound heart, and a 
sound creed. 

I am not sure whether I ought to notice the 
tee-total objection. His business as a brewer is 
thought to be against him. No Christian, it is 



130 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

supposed, could continue in such a trade. As 
I do not myself consider the tee -total theory- 
true, nor its practices binding, — though I ac- 
knowledge and rejoice in the good it has 
wrought, — I can, of bourse, believe in the 
lawfulness of Sir Fowell Buxton's business. 
Everything lawful can be defended ; I could 
defend, therefore, his making porter, just as I 
could defend his going into parliament. At the 
same time, I am willing to concede, that such 
very large concerns have their temptations; 
that they may involve such a necessity for the 
possession and maintenance of so much public- 
house property as can hardly be a happy sub- 
ject of contemplation ; that they are symptoms 
of a state of society, and may possibly operate 
as encouragements to it, which one would wil- 
lingly see improved ; — and, in short, that 
they, and nothing like them, will exist in the 
millennium. Still, while admitting all this, I 
do believe that Sir Fowell Buxton would not 
willingly have supported a system which was 
worked in any way inconsistent with public 
morals. Besides, one who entered into the 
business forty years ago, before tee-total ism 
was ever heard of, is not to be judged by the 
state of the public mind now, — certainly not 
by that of only a part of the public. " Happy 
is he that condemneth not himself in that thing 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 131 

which he alloweth." This blessedness, un- 
questionably, was our friend's. 

The only thing which I have heard of lately, 
as particularly scandalizing some parties, is Sir 
Fowell Buxton's fondness for shooting. They 
cannot understand it. There is a mystery 'in 
the thing. The idea of a man having family 
worship, reading the Bible, and then going out 
with the gun ! Still more, that he should 
write down, with the same pen, an account of 
his shooting into the sky against the birds, and 
then something about his soul soaring above it 
by faith and prayer! It is strange — suspi- 
cious — inexplicable! They cannot make it 
out. I really believe that many good and pious 
people are seriously distressed by the thought 
of this matter; while others, who dislike an 
Evangelical, or abhor a Whig, make them- 
selves merry, or pretend to be serious, over 
Buxton's inconsistency. Had he only hap- 
pened to have been simply orthodox, or a 
"high and dry," and on the right side, he 
might have passed for a a pillar," or a "but- 
tress," of the good old sort, if he had not had 
more religion in the whole of his great big body 
that he really had in his little finger. 

The fact, in my honest opinion, is neither 
more nor less than this : — Sir Fowell Buxton 
was rather too keen a sportsman; he was 
devoted to shooting to something like excess. 



132 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

He admitted and lamented it, I think. I don't 
quite like his feeding the pheasants out of the 
window, — petting the creatures he intended to 
fire at, — though, perhaps, this is more senti- 
mentalism than philosophy, or may be indica- 
tive of my innocence in respect to the gun. 
However, admitting all this, the explanation 
and defence of Sir Fowell Buxton I rest on this 
fact : — he was never a vicious man ; he was 
never drawn away by any field-companions 
into a debauch. Had he, at any time, sunk 
into low and sensual habits, — especially if 
these could have been traced to his shooting 
associates, — then, when he was met by God's 
grace, and, as he would in that case have 
been, suddenly converted, he would never have 
touched a gun more; — he would have regarded 
it as the means of his fall, — he would have 
hated it as the memorial of his disgrace. But he 
had no such feelings. Shooting, with him, had 
never been anything but an innocent recreation. 
It is not an immorality in itself. Nobody can 
honestly see a resemblance between Buxton 
writing in his journal after shooting, and 
Rochester doing so when plotting to govern 
James by a harlot ! * Shooting had braced 
Buxton when a boy; — had kept him out of 
mischief, perhaps, when a lad ; — gave him 
health and recreation as a man; — reanimated 

*See Maeaulay's History of England, vol. u., pp. 73, 74. 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 133 

his jaded and worn-out system as a member of 
parliament, when sunk and wasted with the 
toils of a session. Had it been ever associated 
with immorality, it would have been aban- 
doned when a change took place in his charac- 
ter ; but that change was really gradual, — 
it was growth and development, progress 
and advance, rather than turning round ; — 
and hence his continuance in the use of an 
exercise which he had no painful reasons for 
abandoning. Depend upon it, some Chris- 
tians shun things that others can approach, 
because, in the one case, there is the painful 
recollection of perversion and abuse, and, in 
the other, there is nothing but the innocent and 
rational use of an allowable liberty or a defensi- 
ble indulgence. I would not willingly lower 
the standard of Christian conduct. I think the 
more a man is above an excessive or enslaving 
attachment to shooting, or boating, or anything 
else, so much the better ; but I also think that 
there is a great lesson for the young in the fact, 
that while " to the pure all things are pure," 
"to them that are defiled there is nothing 
pure." He who has preserved himself "un- 
spotted," — who has lived without darkening 
the recollections of memory or poisoning the 
springs of thought, — who has been "kept from 
the pollutions that are in the world through 
lust," — who has not forfeited his right to look 
12 



134 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

round him with a sparkling eye and u a merry- 
heart," — such an one, however spiritual he 
may "become, will always regard with candor 
and love the conduct of others, and will feel, 
too, that his religious growth requires but little 
to be positively abandoned in his own. Relig- 
ion is the enemy of no pleasure consistent with 
innocence. 

IV. 

Such was Sir Fowell Buxton, — in his con- 
stitution and character, his labors and his for- 
tune, his life and death: — such was he by 
nature, by circumstances, by self-culture, and 
by the grace of God. There he stands, a study 
for young men. Although I am well aware 
that I have left many things unsaid which 
might have been advanced, and that would 
have added, here and there, something of 
grace or beauty to the picture, yet, as I have 
labored to give you a full view of all that was 
essential to' the completeness of the subject, so, 
I hope, I have on the whole done so. What a 
pure, manly, useful, noble life has passed before 
you ! How much in the character of the man 
to awaken admiration, to inspire respect, to 
attract love, to encourage effort and to prompt 
to imitation ! Only compare such a life as Sir 
Fowell Buxton's with other forms of life that 
will occur to you, — or the elements and spirit 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 135 

of his character, — its strength and depth, 
its humanity and religiousness, — with that 
of some whom you may have known, or of 
whom you have heard or read. I make no 
claim for Sir Fowell Buxton of extraordinary 
genius, or even of splendid talents. I do 
claim for him, however, what is better than 
either, and more valuable than both or all. I 
sum up my conception of him, — in the lan- 
guage of the Book he so much loved, and 
in words which honor the Source of " every 
good and perfect gift:" — "God gave unto 
him the spirit of power, and of love, and 
of a sound mind." I know no statement that 
more accurately comprehends and conveys 
what our friend was. Take him as such, and 
compare him with any one you like — distin- 
guished or undistinguished — of the sons of 
men; his friends can calmly abide the issue. 
Contrasts, however, occur to us of many sorts ; 
and some of them very affecting. 

One of the finest specimens I know, of virtue 
without piety, is presented in the " Life of the 
late Sir Samuel Romilly." The book is ex- 
ceedingly interesting, and the character of Sir 
Samuel comes out in many aspects of goodness 
and beauty. But to a religious mind, — to one 
especially imbued with the spirit of evangelical 
belief and of earnest devotion, — it is one of the 
most melancholy books, and the picture of its 



136 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

accomplished subject one of the saddest sights, 
I know. Romiliy and Buxton both rose into 
distinction through inherent force of character, 
and alike rose, we might almost say, from the 
city ; they both were members of parliament, — 
both gave their attention to some subjects in 
common, — both were made baronets ; each 
had his Life written by his son, and the charac- 
ter of each has much resemblance, in some of 
its solid excellences, to the other. But there is 
not the slightest indication of piety, according 
to our views of it, in Romiliy 's "Life," from 
beginning to end. He never prayed, properly 
speaking; for he had views which made him 
imagine it was wrong or unnecessary to ask 
anything "from above." The nearest ap- 
proach to prayer that appears, is a paper con- 
taining a sort of philosophical address to God ; 
— grateful, indeed, but as emphatically heathen 
as if no gospel had ever been revealed. How 
different the volume before us ! One of its 
most remarkable features is the quantity of it 
indicative of Buxton's devout " walking with 
God" while continually busy with the world 
and men. Romiliy and Buxton both married, 
though at different ages, those who rilled them 
with supreme satisfaction. By the loss of his 
wife, the mind of the one was so overturned 
that he fell, a few days afterwards, by his own 
hand. The other had not to pass through the 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 137 

same sorrow; — but he had deep afflictions, 
under which his faith sustained him, and there 
is no doubt that if he had been called to the 
greatest allotted to man, he would have been 
able to say, though not without anguish and 
tears, " The cup which my Father hath given 
me, shall I not drink it?" 

Look at Sheridan, again. How poor the 
man of wit and genius appears, in comparison 
with our plodding, uninspired Sir Fowell ! 
How wretchedly low, the careless, reckless, 
impulsive creature, seen by the side of the man 
of prudence, of worth, of piety, — the man who 
had no respect for anything that would contra- 
vene duty — no notion of great parts or true 
manhood separate from God ! Sheridan la- 
bored to be brilliant — Buxton to be substan- 
tial. The one often spoke for immediate effect 
— the other always to secure a valuable end; 
the one thought of fame — the other of useful- 
ness ; the one was willing to be admired — the 
other wished to be understood ; the one had no 
great aim in life, no grand moral object — the 
other was possessed by passions and ends that 
elevated and dignified him ; the one left no 
memorial in anything done — the other achieved 
much that he attempted. Poor Sheridan ! a 
man feeble in principle, extravagant, careless, 
selfish ; one whom nobody could help, and who 
would not help himself; who was praised for 
12* 



138 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

his powers, admired for occasional great efforts, 
and for some light literary productions, hut who 
did nothing approaching to what labor and 
morals might have helped him to accomplish. 
He progressively descended, lower and lower, 
in his tastes and habits, — went on, without 
respect and without sympathy, till, at last, he 
sunk into the grave a shadow and a wreck, 
leaving many to mourn — many to pity — but 
none who really honored him while living, or 
who could venerate or enshrine his memory 
when dead. How opposite to all this the char- 
acter before you ! 

It would be easy to dwell upon other in- 
stances. Contrast, for instance, Buxton's life 
with that of one of mere refinement, literature, 
show, voluptuousness. — like that of Beckford 
or Fon thill. How poor the man of taste and 
extravagance, beside an individual whose career 
embodied the poetry of utility — utility in its 
highest and best sense; — the poetry of all that 
is great and sterling, bold and bright, in the 
purest morals, the most manifest unselfishness, 
toil for the benefit of others — service and sym- 
pathy wherever needed ! Beautiful thoughts, 
beautiful words, style of composition, style of 
life, pomp, magnificence, and so on, — these 
things are all very well ; but it is better to be a 
great book than to write one, — to live and act 
a poem, than to compose it. It is a fine thing 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 139 

for a man's life to be a true epic. Great pur- 
suits and high purposes constituting the idea; 
moral conflicts, the battles and victories; good 
deeds, the sounding lines ; the sweet rhythm, the 
flowing harmonies of a pure conscience : and 
the poetical justice seen in the end, the glorious 
working out of God's eternal laws in favor of 
all who serve him loyally. What miserable 
moral composition some of your fine authors 
and great poets themselves are ! What dog- 
gerel in comparison with the glorious psalm of 
a good man's life ! 

How different again, and how superior, Bux- 
ton's course to that of a weak-headed, soft- 
hearted, benevolent enthusiast ! One whose 
own habits may not be bad, but who has spent 
his life in the dissemination of principles — 
under the idea of benefiting the world ! — which 
corrupt and debase wherever they prevail. A 
man who has spent a fortune in Utopian plans 
for remodelling society, — who believes him- 
self in possession of just the thing that all the 
nations of the world want, — who has tried to 
explain it to many, but who has got few to 
believe and fewer to understand him. A man 
who, so far as his views have had any effect, 
has done nothing but mischief, and given rise 
to nothing but disorder ; and who yet clings to 
the idea that, if he could only get society to 
reconstruct itself, to give up religion, to aban- 



140 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

don certain social monopolies that lie at the 
basis of domestic life, pull down all towns and 
cities, and arrange itself according to the pal 
tern of some ideal parallelograms — all would 
be well, nothing could hinder the dawn of the 
millennium ! How much better for Buxton, t 7 jat 
he possessed the spirit of " a sound mind I " 
How much wiser he, to spend his life in aiming 
at possibilities ; and how happy for him at last, 
to feel that he had not lived and labored in 



vain 



What a contrast is Buxton to others of his 
contemporaries ! A banker in Berners-street 
finds himself in difficulties, and commences a 
course of fraud and forgery to keep up the 
credit of the house. At all hazards, he will 
retain his place in society, and have, at least, 
the outward seeming of a gentleman, — though 
he is pursuing, all the time, a life of deceit and 
falsehood, and appropriating the property of 
others as his own. As might be expected, per- 
sonal habits are as irregular as the social are 
criminal. He lives without knowing the bless- 
edness of a home; a husband without the rites 
of the church, — a father without the sanctities 
of the relation. At length, early on a dark, 
damp November morning, a continual low mur- 
muring sound is heard increasing in the thor- 
oughfares of the city. Before the dark abode 
of punishment and crime, men are busy erect- 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 141 

ing the apparatus of death. Yellow flashes 
from various torches flickering against it ren- 
der it dimly visible to the eye, while the hol- 
low sounds of the workman's hammer fall like 
heavy strokes upon the heart. At length it is 
day ; thousands upon thousands are discovered 
— the packed filth and refuse of the metropolis — 
waiting to see a gentleman hanged ! There he 
is ! Beautifully dressed ; elegant in figure ; his 
hair, slightly touched by time, moving in the 
wind ; he has all the appearance of being born 
to move in cultivated society, and to find his 
equals there. But he is here. And now, — 
see, — he is left by every individual having the 
aspect of one of his own class. He has brought 
himself to the level of the wretched dregs and 
offscouring of all things, who seem to hold him 
as their associate, and to hail him as one iden- 
tified with themselves ! What a terrible price 
to have to pay for the past ! There is nothing 
in the universe so expensive as sin. Moral 
courage, true power, principle, religion, would 
not only have kept the man from sinking into 
the criminal, but might have raised him high 
into usefulness and honor. The banker might 
have equalled the brewer, if, like him, he 
had purposed, and worked, and believed, and 
prayed. 

What a contrast such a life as the one before 
us to that of the man who lives for nothing but 



142 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

to grub on, get money, hoard, and leave it ! And 
how such people sometimes leave it ! — causing 
the world to wonder, first at the enormous 
amount of their wealth, and then at the folly 
or vanity — the meanness or injustice — of its 
testamentary distribution. There was an old 
tradesman whom I knew by sight, and whom 
Buxton, I dare say, knew. He accumulated 
much. Every Sunday morning he used to ride 
out into the country, walk about a little on 
Clapham Common, and return to dinner. I 
used to meet him regularly. It was but a poor 
form of life his ; — nothing divine about it. He 
was a social, genial man, too, in his way — but 
had no idea but that of getting money: not much 
faith, I fear, in anything beyond that, — and the 
" great fact," indeed, of the unseen, but not 
unfelt, reality — the stomach ! He married his 
cook ; died very rich ; and left some thousands 
to his Company " to make themselves comforta- 
ble ! " What an idea of the end for which 
man was born ! This man and Buxton seem 
like beings of a different species — yet were 
they alike; living at the same time; inhabiting 
the same city ; within the sound of the same 
Gospel, and capable of the same Divine life. 

What a contrast between Buxton's life and 
that of the man of passion and pleasure ! In 
the second series of Howitt's " Visits to Remark- 
able Places " you will find an account of the 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 143 

dying words of Sir Francis Delaval, lamenting 
a useless, frivolous, dissipated life ; and urging 
on the attention of Mr. Edgeworth the import- 
ance of so living as to be pure and happy in 
himself, and advising him to seek to be " use- 
ful to mankind." Buxton was all this; but he 
was more. As we have repeatedly said, his 
outward, useful, beneficent course — his emi- 
nent moral virtues, were all sustained and puri- 
fied by the impulses of a renewed nature and 
the principles of a Divine life. Lord Chester- 
field says, that the world, and men of the world, 
are all like a painted and illuminated theatre — 
very dazzling and splendid in appearance, but 
not bearing to be examined, or fit to be looked 
at, in respect to the secret sources of illusion. 
"I," said he, " have been on the other side of 
the scenes. I know what lies beneath and 
behind. Beautiful to appearance the world and 
men, as to the outside show of life, — but — to 
see, as I have seen, the ropes and pulleys of 
the stage; to have to smell the smouldering 
tallow candles ; and to be annoyed with the 
oils and paints used for getting up the deceit, — 
it is enough to sicken us with the thought of 
the hollowness of all things." Now, the very 
reverse of all this is the case here; and, in 
spite of infirmity, with every true and holy 
man. Buxton was like a time-piece that, in 
its outward movements, visibly goes in liar- 



144 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

mony with the sun ; the regularity and truth 
of whose index is accounted for when we 
examine its works, and see, as Chesterfield 
says, what is " beneath and behirld." We 
find, in the first place, all the wheels well 
made, and of good material ; and we find, in 
the second, that the central spring, whence 
issue motion and power to every part, rests 
upon a diamond, and is incapable of disturb- 
ance ! In the case of a man of sound under- 
standing and sanctified affections, the analogy 
is complete. The outward is correct ; — the 
works underneath, of head and heart, are 
strong and good ; — but the basis and source of 
all activity, — the grand preserver of visible 
order, — is the Divine principle in the centre of 
being ; the life of God in the soul of man. 

Hear, then, the conclusion of the whole mat- 
ter. Study the subject that has been presented 
to you; meditate upon it; pray over it: and 
strive to be like it. In many things you may. 
I know the objection which some of you are 
ready to offer. You would say, " It is all very 
well talking ; but, — give us the position, the 
opportunities, and the chances, of Buxton, and 
we will be something too. What can be done by 
young men without an opening, without a start, 
without connections, without capital, without 
society; — worn out by unrelieved toil, and 
ready, therefore, to find solace in excitement, 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 145 

and tempted to take recreation on the Sabbath V 
Well, I make allowance for the difference of 
position. Sir Fowell Buxton was in more fa- 
vored circumstances than many of you ; still, as 
I told you before, you may be benefited by the 
principles involved in any example, however 
different the individual from yourselves in rank. 
You have much to struggle with. The isolation 
in which many of you are placed, residing by 
yourselves in large establishments like so many 
monastic institutions, is not good for you; — it 
may be unfavorable to happiness, to morals, to 
manners, to religion. I hope, however, that 
with respect to some of these things, there is a 
process of improvement going on. The Early 
Closing movement is advancing, and is gaining 
strength as it proceeds. Some wholesale houses 
are even beginning to give the Saturday after- 
noon, in addition to the evening hours. If this 
becomes general — and I know not why London 
should be behind Manchester — there will be no 
conceivable excuse for Sunday recreations. The 
influence of a society like this may be expected, 
also, gradually to produce an effect on your 
employers; and, where such things are not, to 
lead to libraries and reading-rooms, and con- 
veniences for retirement, that you may have, 
in their establishments, the means of happy 
and useful home-occupation, and opportunity 
for private reflection and thought. But sup- 
13 



146 A STUDY FOR YOUNCx MEN. 

pose the worst. Put everything in the most 
unfavorable light, and, when the worst is real- 
ized, it just comes to this, that there is the 
greater need for your carefully attending to those 
very things which have been set before you, — 
for cultivating the natural virtue of resolute 
determination, — and seeking the Divine gifts 
of an inward life. None of you may be Bux- 
tons in the actual form of your outward course, 
but all of you may, in your principles and char- 
acter. By studying him as a model, you may 
even come to surpass him; for, your circum- 
stances may be suc'h as to make the difference 
all in your favor, supposing you should ap- 
proach to anything like what he was. 

I have known many cases in which there 
have been, in their degree, in young men of 
your class, essentially the same sort of experi- 
ence and history as that we have been going 
through to-night. A young lad has come from 
a town in Yorkshire, or a village in Sussex, — 
like Buxton from Devonshire, witli its beautiful 
scenery and spreading sea; or, like others, from 
the land of the lake and the heather, — from 
the fresh breezes of moor and mountain, — and 
he has been set down, solitary and inexperi- 
enced, in the midst of the crowds and ware- 
houses of the city. I have known such in 
imminent peril from the influence of his first 
associates; but good sense, self-respect, ambi- 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 147 

tion to rise, — the Christian friend, the Bible, 
and the Church, — have combined in their in- 
fluences to preserve or to restore, to raise to 
respectability and to sanctify by religion. * I 
have known the Aldersgate Institution do for 
some what Dublin University did for Buxton. 
Habits of self-improvement have been formed, 
which have been favorable to character, to ad- 
vancement in society, and success in life. An 
Easter visit to a friend's family in the country, 
or contact with his sister or cousin in town, has 
brought, perhaps, to bear on manly force the 
influence at once of intelligence and piety. 
New motives have arisen for action — a higher 
influence been infused into the character. Then 
there has been the opening presented, — and the 
attempt made, — and the beginning, and the 
rise, and the determined perseverance, and the 
steady advance, till the man has felt his posi- 
tion established, and found his place among the 
traders and merchants of the land. All this 
while, I have known going on mental processes 
connected with religion, which have been open- 
ing the intellect to truth, drawing the heart to 
God, and fitting the man for the associations 
and duties of a church-life, in connection with 
his manly battle in the world. 

Men talk about heroes and the heroic ele- 
ment; — there is abundant room for the display 
of the latter in many positions of obscure city- 



148 A STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN. 

life, — and many of the former have lived and. 
worked nobly, though unknown. The noblest 
biographies are not always written. There 
have been great, heroic men, who have toiled 
on in their daily duties; and suffered, and sac- 
rificed, and kept their integrity ; and served 
God, and helped their connections, and got on 
themselves; who have displayed in all this, 
qualities of character, — of mind, courage, good- 
ness, — that would have honored a bishop, a 
general, or a judge. The world once saw your 
"hero" in nothing but the strong, stalwart, 
fighting man; — and it has not quite got above 
that yet. How the devil must chuckle at his 
success, when he gets a fellow to think himself 
something wonderful, because he can dress in 
scarlet or blue, and have a sword by his side 
and a feather in his hat; — and when he says 
to him. (and the poor fool believes it,) " Your 
hands are far too delicate to be soiled by the 
dirt of the counter and the shop : " — and then 
whispers to himself, "Keep them for blood — 
human blood I" Fifty to one — as Buxton says 
of Plaistow and the Pope — fifty to one on 
the great unknown — on Brown, Smith, and 
Jones — on any one of them, against Caesar and 
Napoleon. Wood-street against Waterloo, the 
world over ! 

The lesson of this lecture is to help you all, in 
the highest moral sense, to be strong and reso- 



SIR THOMAS FOWELL BUXTON, BART. 149 

lute men ; — pure, devout, God-fearing men. To 
stimulate you to aim at getting on in life; to 
encourage you to try to rise in the world ; — 
and to remind you that, for this, energy and 
character are of far more importance than 
opportunity or luck. Energy will create the 
one, — character is the best form of the other. 
Above all, we wish to teach you, that what- 
ever be the turn your fortunes may take, — that 
piety, prayer, and faith, — that holy converse 
with God, — which were the brightest parts of 
the picture you have seen, and the best posses- 
sion of the man who sat for it, — may be yours. 
The source whence Sir Fowell Buxton drew 
his strength is open for you ; — the Saviour that 
died for him is yours ; — the Gospel that he be- 
lieved is as much your property as it was his ; 
— and prayer can do as much for you as it did 
for him. I take my leave of you with hearty 
good wishes ; praying that the present Young 
Men of London may nobly determine, by G od's 
help, to be what some Young Men of London 
have been before them. 
13* 



